Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
It wasn’t my idea.
In fact, when three Democratic Party leaders from my town first asked me to run, my reaction was simple: “By the time you get to the transgender woman in town and ask her, what? Did everyone else turn you down?”
When they stopped laughing, they assured me that wasn’t it. We were at the organizing meeting of Indivisible Westchester, nine days after many of us had returned from the Women’s March on Washington. I’d spoken up in the meeting, talking about my experience working for the Clinton campaign in North Carolina, the immensely energizing Washington march and my belief that we needed to start the rebuilding at our town’s local level by ousting the two-term town supervisor and the two members of our town board who were up for re-election — all of them running on the Republican line.
But me, run for office? It wasn’t something I’d even vaguely considered.
For a few weeks I did some soul searching and some consultation. After all, I had only nine months earlier come out publicly, with more than a bit of media attention, primarily because in my previous career I’d been a television reporter and anchor, most recently at CBS News. I’d planned a lower profile, as low as one can get after a New York Post Page Six headline saying “Journo Says He’s a She.” At least they’d run a nice picture.
I was an attorney with a still successful practice. A parent worried about the effect on my sons.
But then, Donald Trump. And, worse still, Mike Pence. And for me, resistance was not just my instinct, it was a moral obligation. So, despite knowing that there were only eight elected transgender officials in any positions in the United States (most of them on small-town school boards), and despite knowing that the right wing was likely to do anything but go high in the upcoming campaign, I said yes.
Soon thereafter, on a slate including two other women, both cis, I received the Democratic Party’s nomination. At the time, I was unaware that until that moment no major party had ever nominated a transgender candidate for office in New York.
The news conference that followed the nomination quickly impressed upon me that though I was clear that my gender was irrelevant — that it wouldn’t balance a budget or in any way help anyone in town, but that what I did in office would — the world outside my small town didn’t see it that way.
It was more than that the nomination was a first. There are three pretty prominent residents in our town: Hillary and Bill Clinton live in Chappaqua, the largest hamlet in New Castle, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo lives in the northeastern corner of town. It had not gone unnoticed that they would all have a transgender town supervisor were I to win my race.
Suddenly a local election in a bedroom suburb of New York City attracted reporters not just from the local media but from Teen Vogue to Italian Vanity Fair. Online profile pieces. Long-form video interviews. And though inside the town no one (myself included) wanted to make the race about gender, outside no one cared about much else.
I knew I had to bridge both worlds. That’s not just because I truly care about getting our town back to effective and efficient government, but because of a moral obligation, stemming from the recognition that every person who comes out as transgender not only stands on the shoulders of the amazing trans women of color who lit the fuse on the movement for LGBTQ equality, but that we owe it to those who will come after us to clear the path.
I was thinking of Miss Major, of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera when I realized that I had no option but to come out. And in deciding to run, I was thinking not just of those three giants, but also of our modern-day trailblazers like Sarah McBride, Janet Mock, Melissa Sklarz, and Laverne Cox and of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions more men and women and non binary individuals who are doctors, lawyers, accountants, airline pilots, waiters and factory workers in this nation, indeed people in every walk of life, who just happen to be transgender.
Our very existence is threatened by the regime that has taken over in Washington. And it’s axiomatic that decisions are made by those in the room. So I’m running — first to restore competence to my town’s government, but every bit as importantly, to break down the doors to those rooms and to stand up for what is right…which turns out to be something easy to say, but, unfortunately, something now harder than ever to achieve, not just for those who are transgender but for women of every description, everywhere: true equality.
