At the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Alexander was focused on expanding the rights of transgender people through impact litigation, policy advocacy, and public education.
Previously, Alexander was a law clerk for the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the United States District Court for the Southern District of California.
Alexander, the son of Chinese immigrants, was born in Colorado. He studied English literature at Oxford University and then at Columbia University as a graduate student. At the same time, he was becoming involved in trans activism, and a rift was opening between his public and private worlds. To reconcile the two, Alexander took a multi-disciplinary course at Columbia, Law and the Humanities, which made him realize he wanted a career in civil rights advocacy. He soon started at Harvard Law School to pursue a JD.
At Harvard, Alexander worked to acquire the skills to combine litigation, policy work, and academic research to advance civil rights for trans people. Involved in legal advocacy efforts on campus, he wrote on trans issues for the Harvard Law Review. During the summers, he interned with the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project, and at the National Center for Transgender Equality. ∎