We are excited to announce that the inaugural recipient of the Athan G. Theoharis Summer Internship Program is Sinyetta Hill. 

Each year, the ACLU of Wisconsin welcomes interns who work alongside our dedicated staff to gain experience, learn more about civil rights and civil liberties, and make meaningful memories that they can build on as they begin their careers. 

Last year, we announced the creation of the Athan G. Theoharis Summer Internship. Dr. Theoharis was born to immigrant parents in the 1930s and became a historian, documenting the FBI’s violations of privacy and abuses of power, a teacher, and an author, publishing 23 books and dozens of articles, as well as contributing to three films.

Dr. Theoharis also served on the ACLU of Wisconsin’s state board of directors, including two terms as board president and the Milwaukee Chapter Board of Directors, often speaking on behalf of the organization on surveillance and privacy issues. 

When Dr. Theoharis passed in 2021, his children established a fund in his honor to support internships at the ACLU of Wisconsin for college students who would otherwise be financially unable to take an unpaid internship at a nonprofit organization. This college student interested in civil rights and civil liberties will receive a summer strident to support them for working for 10 weeks over the summer. 

Sinyetta is originally from Tennessee but moved to Milwaukee more than seven years ago. She’s a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, majoring in philosophy and political science, on the pre-law track. Her significant passions include voting rights, human rights, women’s rights, and advocating against capital punishment.

She’s heavily involved at UW-Milwaukee, acting as the at-large senator in the Student Association. She also serves on the Students of Color Advocacy Committee, is an officer in Mock Trial, and is heavily involved in CRU, a Christian student organization. 

In addition to her involvement at school, she also does political work for a candidate running for Senate. She has worked for Rise Free, a student- and youth-led nonprofit working to make higher education accessible and help all young people participate in democracy, where she has worked on and off for two years. This summer, she plans to work to get more people registered to vote and provide information about candidates. 

“As a woman of color, I want to spend more time focusing on issues that hit close to home. I am excited to work with ACLU and participate in things that will better the community,” Sinyetta said. “ I look forward to getting some experience in the legal area since I do dream of becoming a defense attorney someday. I do well with advocating for myself and others, and I can’t wait to be a part of the team.”

We are thrilled to have Sinyetta join the team this summer, helping us protect Wisconsinites' civil rights and civil liberties, just as Athan did his entire career. We are grateful to the Theoharis family for their generosity and the time and dedication it took to establish this program. Athan’s tireless commitment to the ACLU and his lifelong commitment to protecting all civil rights and liberties will never be forgotten.  

Anti-transgender sentiment has become a popular mobilization strategy for everyone from extremist politicians and electoral blocs, to religious leaders and parts of their congregations, to some school boards and parents. In Wisconsin, attacks on the rights of the transgender community attempt to worsen conditions which are already dire.

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee created a new policy on “gender theory” which formalizes transphobia in Milwaukee Catholic churches and schools. The policy forbids anyone from sharing their pronouns, requires staff and students to conform to the clothing, sports teams, and restrooms that match their assigned sex at birth, and bans gender transition medication on archdiocesan property.

The policy’s attempt to erase trans people from Milwaukee’s Catholic community is extremely harmful and only succeeds in further damaging the health and life of the trans faithful and trans youth in Catholic schools. Critically, LGBTQIA religious leaders in Wisconsin state that transgender identity does not go against Catholic teaching, but inflicting religious trauma on trans youth does.

For more than a century, the ACLU has championed religious freedom as a fundamental American right, but we also firmly believe that religious liberty is never a license to discriminate. Aside from narrowly understood exceptions for houses of worship and ministerial positions that protect the preaching of even bigoted religious beliefs and practices, the public interest in eliminating discrimination justifies application of civil rights laws to religiously affiliated organizations. Whether or not the archdiocese’s policies violate those laws, they are undoubtedly harmful and likely to be looked back upon as hopelessly benighted, like Bob Jones University’s religious policy of first excluding Black students and then prohibiting interracial dating on campus.

The archdiocese’s transphobic religious stance comes on the heels of two anti-trans bills proposed by the Wisconsin legislature in the last year including banning trans women’s participation in women’s sports, and banning gender-affirming health care for trans children. Fortunately, Governor Tony Evers vetoed the sports bill after it passed the legislature, but depending on the results of the November gubernatorial election, these bills and more could pass in the next session in the absence of a veto.

So far in 2022, over 300 anti-LGBTQIA laws have been proposed around the country. These bills overwhelmingly have targeted trans youth, and we’ve increasingly seen the lives of trans youth being used for purposes of political point scoring.

But transphobes do not even need to wait for policy to redistribute life and death chances to the detriment of the trans community. Transgender Wisconsinites, and especially multiply marginalized trans people, face disparities in socioeconomic status and health outcomes. Trans teens experience higher rates of homelessness, violence, and suicide risk. The disproportionate chances of interpersonal and state violence against our transgender community members are yet increased by racism, particularly against trans women of color.

At the ACLU of Wisconsin, we have long fought to ensure the rights of trans people to health care and equitable treatment while incarcerated. But such problems persist, and the anti-trans policies being pushed by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and the Wisconsin legislature confirm that we must continue to fight for trans liberation. Trans people belong in, and indeed enrich, our churches, schools, and public life in Wisconsin.

Find LGBTQIA resources here.