Ly Xinzhen Zhangsun Brown, Esq.

Ly Xinzhen Zhangsun Brown is a writer, public speaker, educator, trainer, consultant, advocate, community organizer, community builder, activist, scholar, and attorney. For over fifteen years, they have worked to address and end interpersonal and state violence targeting disabled people—especially those at the "margins of the margins"—within homes, communities, movement spaces, schools, disability-specific institutions, and carceral settings. Their work centers the intersections of disability, queerness, race, gender, class, nation, and migration. Ly has provided training and consultation to hundreds of individuals, educational institutions, agencies, and organizations across numerous professional and academic fields on issues impacting disabled, queer, trans, and negatively racialized people.

 

Ly founded and leads The Autistic People of Color Fund in partnership with the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network. They also created and curate Bearing Witness, Demanding Freedom, the living archive of the Judge Rotenberg Center’s abuses. Along with Morénike Giwa Onaiwu and E. Ashkenazy, Ly co-edited the anthology All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism. Recognized for their advocacy, they were featured as one of ten young activist icons in Amplifier’s We The Future campaign. Their work and story have been highlighted in several documentaries and series, including I Identify As Me, PBS’ American Renegades, The Ride Ahead, My Disability Roadmap, and HBO Max’s Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests. Ly is a former Gender+ Justice Initiative Fellow at Georgetown University and a Justice Catalyst Fellow at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. In 2022, Ly ran for the Maryland General Assembly’s House of Delegates with a core campaign message that "We Deserve Better."

 

As an educator, Ly teaches in the Disability Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies programs at Georgetown University, as well as the American Studies program at American University’s Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies. They also serve as a faculty member and Law and Public Policy Discipline Coordinator for the LEND Training Program at Georgetown. Previously, they held teaching positions at the University of Delaware, Tufts University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Educational Studies Program. Professionally, Ly serves as the Director of Public Policy at the National Disability Institute, focusing on advancing financial freedom and economic opportunity for people with disabilities. Their previous experience includes serving as Policy Counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology—where they focused on algorithmic injustice and bias—and as Director of Policy, Advocacy, and External Affairs at the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network.

 

Ly provides regular consultations and workshops internationally on radical access, care, and justice. They live at the intersection of many forms of marginality and privilege; some identities central to their experience include being a multiply disabled, queer, nonbinary/transmasculine Chinese American, an East Asian survivor of transracial/transnational adoption, and a Jew of color. As a survivor of transnational/transracial adoption, Ly is a settler-of-color arrivant to Turtle Island, living and working on the unceded and occupied traditional homelands of the Piscataway-Conoy, Nacotchtank, Pamunkey, Manahoac, and Susquehannock Nations. They encourage fellow settlers living on Native land to learn more about Indigenous land acknowledgement and to develop solidarity action plans rooted in respect and reciprocity.

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