Allyson Robinson

Allyson Robinson
Robinson at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 2010
Born	Scranton, Pennsylvania, US
Known for	LGBT rights activism

Allyson Robinson is an American human rights activist, specializing in LGBT rights in the United States. She attended West Point before gender reassignment, graduated in 1994 majoring in her undergraduate degree in physics, and was then commissioned as an officer serving in the U.S. Army until 1999. She held the rank of Captain. Also prior to transition, she became an ordained Baptist minister, earning from the Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary, a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) with an emphasis on social justice.

In 2008 she joined the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), oversaw HRC's program to create model curricula for LGBT diversity training in the workplace and advanced to the executive director in 2012.

Later that year she began a short controversial tenure as the first executive director of OutServe-SLDN, a network of LGBT actively serving military personnel, following the merger of OutServe and Servicemembers Legal Defense Network in October 2012. She was the first transgender person to lead a national LGBT rights organization that did not have an explicit transgender focus.

Prior to transitioning, Robinson majored in physics at West Point and graduated in 1994. She later held an internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory and then commanded a Patriot missile unit in Europe and the Middle East before leaving the U.S. Army in 1999. Following this, she became an ordained Baptist minister, earning a master of divinity degree in theology with an emphasis on social justice from Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary in 2007. After transitioning to present as female in 2007, in 2008 she visited West Point and addressed some cadets.