Photographer Catherine Sikora has spent most of her professional life as an engineer. Even so, she is probably better known for her advocacy of laws against discrimination of gender identity and sexual orientation.
But it is her transgender-themed photography that continues to act as a subtle agent for change. At the turn of the century, Sikora was among the elite group of 39 photographers chosen to contribute works to the yearlong snapshot of Chicago documentary known as City 2000. Her portraits of transgendered Chicagoans were the only works in City 2000 related to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community. The year-in-the-life-of-everyday-Chicagoans collection is permanently housed in negative form at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Sikora has also done photography on behalf of several gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community groups and has been published extensively.
Currently, just as California becomes the second state to legalize gay marriage, Sikora and her peers at Equality Illinois are busy lobbying state legislators on the issue. Fighting for mainstream gender identity, she wants legislators to remove or modify the male-female identification tag on Illinois driver’s licenses for transgendered people.
“The gender identity issue is not just for people who are one sex and believe they are another,” Sikora says. “For the vast majority of people, it is very clear, they are male or female. But there even are straight people who blur those lines and like to do things that aren’t normally associated with their gender. I think that is what this entire gender identity thing is about. It is not just for people who feel they should live as the sex that they were born as.”
Over the years, Sikora’s accomplishments have included campaigning for the expansion of the Chicago human rights laws to include gender identity as a specific category for protection. She has also fought for and won the passage of similar legislation by Cook County.
As a board member and activist with Equality Illinois, she has helped influence the 2005 passage of a statewide bill to add sexual orientation (defined as including gender identity) to the Illinois Human Rights Act’s protected categories. That year, Sikora was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.
In conjunction with running a small property rehab business, Sikora donates time and materials to teach job skills to youth at the Jane Addams Resource Corporation. She has been a member of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations’ Advisory Council on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues as well as of other activist groups.
“There are a lot more of us being public about who we are, so we can be seen as activists in that sometimes speaking out does not mean in large ways,” says Sikora, who has been transgendered for more than a decade. Being an activist, for Sikora, can mean “being more out and not worrying about what other people think and always doing what we can do for the GLBT community. That’s it.”
Sikora adds that there are networks for transgendered people interested in connecting with others and speaking out, including Chicago Gender Society, Equality Illinois and groups at the Center on Halsted.
“Always ask questions, and if you want to talk to me, I’m reachable via Equality Illinois,” she says.