Anne Wakabayashi, Philadelphia Delegate
“Hillary Clinton can bring LGBTQ rights even further.”
From Beaver County to Bucks County, delegates are traveling across the Keystone State to support Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention. This week we’re sharing the delegates’ remarkable stories of resilience and tenacity.
My name is Anne Wakabayashi and I’m the Executive Director of Emerge Pennsylvania. I am also a delegate for Hillary Clinton from the first congressional district of Pennsylvania.
Can you give us the background of Emerge Pennsylvania?
Emerge Pennsylvania is a brand new organization in the state. We’ve only been around since December, but we’re part of a national network that’s been around for ten years. Our goal is to recruit and train women for public office. Our goal is to change the face of politics in the state by making sure that more women have the ability to get elected. We do a 70-hour training program and a six month course and at the end of that, they join an incredibly powerful alumni network that gives them the tools they need to be elected across the country.
What kind of an impact do you think a Hillary Clinton presidency would have on young girls and women in our country?
The impact a Hillary Clinton presidency would have is absolutely invaluable. For years we’ve been telling young women that they can be anything that they want to be, including the President of the United States. But we haven’t been able to follow up on that. We’ve never elected one.
For them to see the most powerful person in our country be a woman will forever change the way young women see their futures. Some of the women in our program are millennial or college-aged and some of them are a bit older. The influence that Hillary has on their campaigns, the way they’re looking at their campaigns is amazing.
They see what she’s doing—they see everything she’s accomplishing and they know they can do it, too. They can get themselves elected. They can deal with the critics and struggles in their races because they have a role model in Hillary Clinton, who’s been able to persevere through so much.
There are so many emotions that we’ve had as women seeing Hillary Clinton become the presumptive nominee. Can you describe how you felt the night that it happened?
Seeing Hillary Clinton become the presumptive nominee was an incredible experience. She was the first presidential candidate I ever voted for in 2008. I remember my mom and I watching her “eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling” speech. I remember being so in awe of her at that point, of how far she had made it and then being disappointed but still excited about the direction our country was going in.
For her to make it all the way this time…I called my mom and we both cried a little bit. But it was such an amazing experience and she really changed the way we’re going to be looking at politics.
You’re a leader in the LGBT movement in Pennsylvania. Can you tell us about the work you’ve done for the LGBT community and how you see that kind of work going forward? We know that so much has happened in the past year with marriage equality and LGBT rights. But the fight is obviously not over.
I am the Co-Chair of the Liberty City LGBT Democratic Club, which is a civil advocacy group in Philadelphia. I’ve previously worked for Equality Pennsylvania, doing fundraising for about a year.
When I worked for Equality Pennsylvania, marriage equality had just passed. We’ve made strides in this area so quickly but there’s so much left to do. Marriage equality is great and it’s definitely a step in the right direction. But in Pennsylvania, we have no hate crimes laws, no conversion therapy laws. You can still be fired or kicked out of your house for being gay.
It’s not easy to be an LGBT person in many parts of Pennsylvania right now. It’s safe here in Philadelphia but once you get out to the collar counties, it’s a patchwork of laws. In some townships you can’t get fired; in others you can. Even in Philadelphia, there’s a large amount of violence against trans women, particularly trans women of color.
There is so much left to do. It’s absolutely necessary for us to have a president who can be an ally in that fight. Obama did so much and was the most LGBTQ-friendly president we’ve ever had. Most of the changes he made were through executive orders. To elect Donald Trump would take us backwards.
Hillary Clinton can bring LGBTQ rights even further. With her knowledge of policy and the inner workings of the government, she can find solutions in ways that even advocates don’t know exist. She can be a real team player for us in making sure that we have protections across the board. Orlando showed us that homophobia still exists.
We still have a long fight ahead of us and we can’t get complacent with marriage equality because that only affects a small percentage of our community.
I agree. You’re right that there are so many things that people don’t realize are laws or are not laws in their state. There’s just so much information out there to know. Because things are just so different from state to state, you might assume that if you live in one state and you’re protected, the same thing would be true in other states, but that’s not necessarily the case.
It seems like such a common sense thing that there should be laws on these issues, that you can’t get fired for being gay and being trans. And the idea that there’s not one? It’s so shocking to people. There’s not a push because people don’t know that these laws don’t exist. But once people realize that some of these protections don’t exist, there’s overwhelming support for them.
How can people get involved to help educate more in their community about those issues? Also, how do you think that our millennial population here in Pennsylvania can really start helping to advocate and come together to help the LGBTQ community?
Some of the things that people can do to get involved is to become members of organizations like Liberty City, Equality PA, Young Pittsburgh or the Capital City Social Dems. Get involved with the local LGBT organizations in your community, get on the email list for the local LGBT center and participate in their days of action. There are things to do even if it’s just to make a phone call. It’s two minutes out of your day and it can be huge for those legislators to hear. Small things like that can make a really huge difference.
Millennials in particular are doing a lot right now to drive the conversation about a lot of issues, but in particular the way minority groups intersect. There’s a lot of talk about intersectionality within the LGBT community but also across the board. We have the Black Lives Matter movement that’s been driven by millennials.
Moving forward we’re going to have some great conversations about sort of the structural issues between what being a queer person of color looks like and what being a trans person of color looks like, because the struggles are different.
As an LGBT community and as a general society, we need to be looking at that more. Millennials are already driving that conversation and pushing people to look past face value and look towards the structural things that we can change to move our country forward in real ways. Real gains.
You made a great point that sometimes people don’t know that making a phone call to representatives will make a difference. But we know the louder that voice is and the more people do it, the more powerful that will be.
Today is June 30th, which marks the end of Pride Month. We saw a lot of great solidarity actions, especially in light of the tragedy in Orlando. We had people across the state of Pennsylvania, including a lot of our organizers, marching in Pride parades and doing a lot of work there. What does pride and everything that stands for mean to you?
Pride month is the time when we talk about LGBTQ issues with a wider audience, but you see pride in our community year round. So much about about being gay, about being a member of the LGBT community, is being out every day of the year.
Once people know another gay person or trans person, all of a sudden they’re like, “Wait a minute. They’re people too!” So much of being a member of the community is being out. That’s so powerful. Pride is that. It’s our community coming out and saying, “Hey city, we’re going to shut down a piece of you for a party. But we’re going to be unabashedly who we are, whatever that is, and that’s just how it’s going to be.”
For the community itself, it’s a really powerful time for us to come together and draw closer to each other so we can continue to live year round in that. Not everyone gets to live in Philadelphia. I live a couple blocks from the Gayborhood. Not everyone has that. You’re living out in northern Bucks County where maybe you don’t have LGBT people around you every day. So it’s to come together and draw that strength again. Especially in light of Orlando where you saw a very powerful community come together in a very serious way, it’s a real testament that you didn’t see any pride parades shutting down.
If I had to guess, you’d see more people going to Pride events because they just had to be with other people who understood the pain. Pride’s a really powerful thing that’s hard to put into words.
Before I worked for Emerge and got to be around powerful, awesome women just all the time, I worked in politics and was around men a lot. I was in a very straight, male-dominated world and being able to spend time with people that understood me and who I didn’t have to explain myself to, that was really valuable.
What are you most looking forward to from a Hillary Clinton administration, especially for the LGBT community? What are ways that a Hillary Clinton administration would translate into policy here in Pennsylvania?
In Pennsylvania, we have an overwhelmingly Republican legislature that is disinclined to take up any LGBT protection bills, or have any conversations about LGBT issues. So changes coming in at the federal level are a huge deal.
I’m really excited about Hillary Clinton because she understands the nuances of government and policy. She’ll be able to find ways to make change in really small ways.
So many of the issues that the LGBT community faces are very wonky policy issues. For example, health coverage for trans people. How do we make sure that they have good health care? How do we make sure the LGBT community has employment and housing protections across the country?
There is so much that can be done at the federal level to protect wide swaths of LGBT people. Hillary Clinton can do a lot of minor things with her administration that would make huge impacts on the lives of LGBT Pennsylvanians and LGBT Americans, so that’s what I’m really excited for.
Did you have a moment when you knew Hillary was the right kind of candidate for you or did your support evolve over time? What was going on when you made that realization?
My path towards realizing Hillary Clinton was the right candidate for me evolved over time. I really liked her in 2008. In 2004, when Kerry ran, I was walking around high school with a Kerry button on my backpack. He was great as a candidate but to the fourteen, fifteen year old me, he wasn’t particularly exciting.
But seeing somebody that kind of looked like me, who was a woman, and was the kind of person that I admired already, was huge. It was really inspiring. It’s also a lot of why I liked Obama as much as I did. Seeing somebody who’s not a straight white guy in office is always great. But I wasn’t as familiar with policy then.
Watching Hillary become Secretary of State and watching her campaign over the years, specifically the past year, has been amazing. She’s an amazing person. When I got to meet her, I barely even spoke in complete sentences.
She did a video for Emerge America’s tenth anniversary — it was so kind of her to do that for us. I attempted to thank her but I don’t think those words came out. She said, “I love Emerge.” I really felt like this is somebody that gets it. She gets what I do and what I care about and that’s become more and more clear over the last eight years. She’s gotten a lot better about saying, “This is who I am. I’m a lot like you.”
She’s amazing, and I feel really good that the first woman running for president is this qualified and this amazing and this accomplished and genuine. I feel really, really good about supporting her. Anybody who’s interested in running for office or interested in finding out a little bit more about Emerge can go to EmergePA.org and check us out. We would love to have any woman in Pennsylvania who’s interested in running for office.
