Trans Elected Officials report released

Earlier this month, a number of trans and other activists met in the Houses of Parliament in London to discuss the release of a new and (to the best of my knowledge) unique report. It collects together a list of trans politicians who has stood for or been elected to public office, and it well worth a read. You can download the full report, in PDF form, from the LGBTQ Representation and Rights Initiative who are based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I know from having covered this in the past on this blog that it can be terribly hard to get information on this topic, and made more difficult by the need to verify details to an extent not needed in other walks of life. When the authors of Standing Out compiled an earlier report, one party in the UK either “outed” or erroneously listed one of their own candidates as trans, which led to threats of legal action against the authors of the report.

However, I suspect many readers here will have useful bits of information on the topic of trans politicians that have not made it into the report – if you do, please do drop them a line via their web site.

Whilst the media might like to portray trans people as terribly interesting and worthy of several column inches in the battle to sell papers and advertising, my drive has always been to try to make being trans in politics a little more normal and emphasise that there have been and remain quite a number of us active at many levels of government. In that vein, and in the hope it encourages more people to openly stand, I will leave you with a quote from one of the report’s authors, Andrew Reynolds:

There is no evidence that, once selected, LGB and trans people are systematically less likely to win an election.