Leading advocates for transgendered New Yorkers and a top official from the city’s Human Resources Administration (HRA) announced that New York’s sprawling welfare bureaucracy is now prepared to implement best practices guidelines for working with gender-nonconforming clients —more than four years after the policy was worked out in principle and nearly eight years after enactment of a gender identity and expression nondiscrimination law.

Appearing at a February 17 press conference at the Housing Works Bookstore in Soho, Reina Gossett, a representative of Queers for Economic Justice, hailed the breakthrough, which won final approval in December from HRA Commissioner Robert Doar, but cautioned, “We still have far to go. In the past, similar city policies have failed in the training phase using inadequate curriculum and trainers lacking cultural competence. We need everyone’s support to insure that all HRA employees are trained.”

Recalling that in the past, some trans clients seeking public assistance “were told to go home and come back when they were dressed in their appropriate gender,” Tracy Bumpus of Housing Works, the AIDS services group, described two long years of painstaking negotiation between advocates and city officials preceding this week’s announcement.

“It was often heated and sometimes we felt as though our voices were not being heard,” Bumpus said, before adding, “Today, we would like to thank the HRA for hearing our voices.”

Jane Corbett, HRA’s executive deputy commissioner, said, “This day has been a long time coming,” and explained that when drafts of the guidelines were first circulated in the department, “we felt we would get a negative reaction from some people in HRA. There was none.”

The best practices guidelines — which Corbett distributed to staff via memorandum — describes the city’s human rights law, explains the concepts of gender and gender identity, instructs city employees to address clients with the names and by the pronouns they prefer, points out that public restroom access is available based on the user’s gender identity and expression and that a client’s choice of dress cannot be dictated by gender stereotypes, and gives clients the right to obtain photo identification consistent with their current appearance. The memo also lays out the penalties facing employees who fail to follow procedures and the mechanisms for reporting complaints.

Other advocacy groups that worked with the city on the new guidelines included the TransJustice program at Brooklyn’s Audre Lorde Project and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project.