"When we can talk to each other and work with each other as human beings, that's when we can make a change."

Andre Wilson has been proving it for years. A union activist in Ann Arbor, Mich., since the late 1970s, Wilson was the first openly transgender person to head a contract negotiating team for a local union—the American Federation of Teachers Local 3550, better known as the Graduate Employees' Organization (GEO) at the University of Michigan.

The GEO's members are the university's 1,600 graduate employees, who teach classes and work in the libraries. Like graduate employees at several other universities, they fought long and hard for recognition from university management, and today fight the same battles as other working people: for decent wages and fair working conditions—and against discrimination.

Wilson was introduced to unions long before the GEO, in 1978. As a young lesbian just starting at the University of Michigan, Wilson joined a campaign to organize office workers on campus. A few years later, while working as a truck driver, Wilson helped organize a union local, putting together their bylaws and drafting the first contract.  “We all debated everything. It was time-consuming and we probably reinvented some wheels, but we were all involved."

Wilson began studying architecture at the University of Michigan in 1996 and served as a GEO shop steward. In 2002, after starting his transition from female to male, Wilson learned that the graduate employees' health care coverage— like most health plans—excluded transgender transitions.

The GEO's contract negotiations were coming up, and members decided to take on the issue. "They elected an out transgender person as lead negotiator,” Wilson says. “That was an enormous vote of confidence."

Ultimately, GEO won health care coverage for transgender transitions.

"No one on the national or regional LGBT scene believed it," he recalls. "No other trans health advocates around the country thought we could. Many in GEO were skeptical. Yet we had a vision and stuck to it."

But Wilson says the local didn't focus only on this issue. Its "Equity and Access" campaign also won better child care subsidies, elimination of discriminatory fees imposed only on international students, equal wages for library employees and—for all GEO members—a wage increase and a limit on increases in health insurance co-payments.

The campaign made waves. An AFT-Michigan resolution encouraged all locals to fight for the rights of transgender members and for nondiscrimination language protecting gender identity or expression. The graduate employees local at Wayne State University in Detroit successfully bargained to add gender identity or expression to the school’s nondiscrimination clause. And Wilson now talks to AFT locals across the country about fighting for such rights and for nondiscrimination language.

Wilson works inside the union movement, including in the AFL-CIO's LGBT constituency group, Pride at Work—but also brings the movement's message to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. He says, "If we expect unions to be there for us, we have to be there for unions. Our LGBT organizations must support workers trying to organize into unions."

After nearly 30 years in the union movement, Wilson says unions offer the opportunity for understanding among members. "This is a place where we can talk member to member, where we can join with each other on our different issues, where we can come to a real understanding that another member's issues really are our issues."

He adds, "Somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of all workers in this country are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, and nearly every worker has an LGBT family member. There isn't a single worker in this country that we can write off. If we ever do that, we lose our union movement."