Represent!
LGBTQ+ representation matters, in every aspect of life, including in city halls, county courthouses, state capitals, and someday, the highest offices in the land.
The LGBTQ Victory Fund reports that following last month’s election, more than one thousand LGBTQ+ individuals will hold office in this country, a first in our history. When I read that headline, my sixty-two year old mind flashed back to 1978, my sophomore year in college when the list of Out elected officials consisted of San Francisco Supervisory Harvey Milk. . .and Harvey Milk.
This hasn’t been an overnight revolution. It has indeed been decades in the making. There were wins for gay candidates in New York City and Cleveland, but also in places like Montana as well.
It’s especially meaningful to me to see several transgender and nonbinary people in the ranks of that thousand. Voters in a suburban school district near Cleveland chose Dion Manley for their school board; he’s the first out official in the state of Ohio, according to NBC News.
Also from NBC:
“Xander Orenstein, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, became the first nonbinary person elected to a judicial position in the United States after winning their race for the Allegheny County Magisterial District Court in Pennsylvania.
“Thu Nguyen, a Democrat, became the first nonbinary person elected in the state of Massachusetts after winning their race for Worcester City Council, according to the Victory Fund. Orenstein and Nguyen will add to the small pool of nonbinary elected officials serving in the United States, which currently stands at 11.”
Danica Roem was elected to a third term in the Virginia House of Delegates, making her the longest serving transgender official in the country. She’s been able to win and keep her seat by focusing on the kind of bread-and -butter issues that matters to all voters, like good roads and go od skills. In add three of her elections, she’s had opponents who tried to make an issue of her status as a transgender woman.
It’s hard for me not to see photos or news clips of Roem and not think back to a documentary about her that was released soon after she won her first election. A young transgender girl’s mother brought her daughter to meet Danica. She had faced ostracism and ridicule at her school. As she hugged Roem, she told she wanted to grow up to be like her someday.
I’ve got a far smaller platform, as a county commissioner in rural Oregon, but I’ve met a small handful of people in my community who said my willingness to live authentically on a public stage by transitioning during my last term helped give them courage of come out themselves. It was spiritual teacher Ram Dass who said in the end, we’re all walking each other home.
All of these wins are cause of celebration, but I have a more expansive dream. Imagine living in a time and place where someone’s LGBTQ + status is looked on as so routine it doesn’t draw significant attention. That’s a world I probably won’t live to see. . .but when I look back on 1978 I realize that progress is possible. Progress is real.
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Category: Transgender Opinion
About the Author (Author Profile)
Claire Hall was born and grew up in a large city on the left coast and has spent most of her adult years in a beautiful small coastal community where she's now an elected official in local government after spending many years as a newspaper and radio reporter. In her space time she loves reading, writing fiction (her first novel was published by a regional press a couple of years ago), watching classic Hollywood movies, and walking.Subscribe
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