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October 24, 2010
Advocates Hope Transgender Identity Is Not a Defining One

By JESSE McKINLEY and MALIA WOLLAN

SAN FRANCISCO — Theresa Sparks, a candidate for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, is running on what some might see as a conservative platform: she is pro-development and anti-loitering, pro-police and anti-grime. She has been endorsed by the mayor, the city’s firefighters’ union and the county deputy sheriff’s association.

But that is not what sets Ms. Sparks apart; it is her past. Until a decade ago, Ms. Sparks was a man, before a gender reassignment surgery. And while her sex may have changed, her politics did not.

“This district really needs someone with a strong business background, a strong economic background and a really wide diversity of experience,” said Ms. Sparks, who is an experienced engineer, a United States Navy veteran and the former chief executive of Good Vibrations, a sex toy company. “And I’m really the only person who has that in this race.”

If elected, Ms. Sparks would be the first transgender supervisor in San Francisco — the liberal enclave where Harvey Milk was elected as one of the nation’s first openly gay officials in 1977, and perhaps the only place where Ms. Sparks might be considered right-of-center.

But she is not the only transgender person campaigning for public office this fall. And unlike in years past, when such candidates were often considered mere curiosities, several are within striking distance of historic victories.

Across San Francisco Bay, for example, Victoria Kolakowski was the leading vote-getter in a June election for Superior Court judge in Alameda County; a victory in a runoff next month would make her the first transgender trial court judge in the nation.

“I want people to know that we are capable of being everything,” Ms. Kolakowski said.

In Oklahoma, Brittany Novotny, a 30-year-old Democrat, is competitive in the Republican-leaning 84th District for the State House of Representatives, despite supporters of her opponent who have ridiculed her as a “confused it.” And there are transgender incumbents in Oregon — where the mayor of Silverton, Stu Rasmussen, is seeking a fourth term, and her second as a woman — and Hawaii, where Kim Coco Iwamoto is seeking to return to the State Board of Education.

All of which has been hailed by advocates as both a sign of acceptance and, they hope, a sign that actual issues are being valued more than gender stereotypes.

“People aren’t sitting around saying, ‘Gee, I wish we had a transgender judge,’ ” said Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington. “They’re saying, ‘We want a really good judge.’ ” Gay rights activists hope that the visibility of the candidates will help normalize people’s relations with people who are transgender — a broad category that includes heterosexual cross-dressers, homosexual drag queens and kings, and those who believe that they were born in the wrong body.

And while the issues that face gays and transgender people often differ, a recent spate of suicides among young gay men has intensified the need for positive political role models, said Chuck Wolfe, the president and chief executive of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, which backs gay and lesbian political candidates.

“Knowing there’s openly gay people sitting in those positions will definitely have an impact,” he said.

Mr. Wolfe said that recently he had seen more and more “inspired, comfortable and confident” transgender people in his group’s training classes. There are also more gay and lesbian candidates in general now, a surge that Mr. Wolfe ascribes, in part, to newly elected — and openly gay — leaders like Mayor Annise Parker in Houston and Simone Bell, a lesbian who won a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives in December.

That said, the number of transgender candidates is still small, and often unsuccessful. Dana Beyer, a candidate for a seat in the Maryland Assembly, lost in a Democratic primary in September, despite an endorsement from The Washington Post.

Still, Ms. Beyer, 58, a retired physician who had a sex change in 2003, describes the experience as almost therapeutic.

“I was a terrible introvert for 50 years,” she said. “And the first time I started knocking on doors, I was scared to death. But I discovered I actually liked doing it.”

While most of the transgender candidates have been Democrats, in Florida, Donna Milo — a pro-gun, anti-tax, male-to-female Republican (and, interestingly enough, anti-same-sex marriage) — lost a primary for Congress in August. She did, however, receive 22.5 percent of the vote.

Many of the transgender candidates say that their personal histories inform, but do not define, their campaigns. Ms. Kolakowski, 49, transitioned more than two decades ago, and now lives with her wife, Cynthia Laird. (They were married in 2008, when same-sex marriage was briefly legal in California.) On her Web site, she trumpets her potential victory — there is a banner saying “Making History!” — but played down the significance of her sex change in an interview.

“I’m not running for this office because I’m trying to be a transgender representative,” she said. “But it will have a positive effect on the transgender community.”

Not that gender issues have not been raised in some campaigns. In the Oklahoma House race, Ms. Novotny — who had a sex change operation in 2007 — shrugged off a recent e-mail from Charlie Meadows, the chairman of a conservative political action committee, which referred to her as an “it.”

“That’s just the typical politics I would expect out of that side,” she said. “And frankly it’s what voters are tired of.”

Such a characterization seems less likely in San Francisco, which has a sizable population of transgender individuals. And Ms. Sparks, a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a quick smile, has significant public experience here: she served as the president of the city’s police commission and currently is the executive director of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. But it is her conservative bona fides that have attracted people like Jim Flood, a lifelong Republican and an heir to one of the city’s founding families and fortunes.

Mr. Flood said that when he first heard of Ms. Sparks’s “unusual background,” he wanted nothing to do with it. But he found himself impressed by her positions on issues like the city’s proposed “sit-lie” law, which would make it illegal to sit or lie on public sidewalks for most of the day.

“She’s got common sense,” said Mr. Flood, at a campaign event. “And business sense.”

This being San Francisco, of course, Ms. Sparks has also been criticized as being too cozy with developers and politicians associated with the Sixth District, which includes parts of downtown and the gritty Tenderloin neighborhood. “Sparks is the candidate of the mayor and downtown,” read a recent editorial in The San Francisco Bay Guardian. “It’s important that she be defeated.”

Ms. Sparks acknowledges being pro-business, but also is not shy about talking about her own past, which included bouts of electro-shock therapy, two divorces and a long stretch of estrangement from two of her three children.

They were hard times, she said, which San Francisco helped heal.

“I came to this city 15 years ago as a kind of city of refuge for me when I transitioned,” Ms. Sparks said. “And you know, I think it’s time I gave back.”


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Alexander Snyder-Mackler
Biden for Attorney General
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