The White House’s first transgender staffer is from Massachusetts
Meet Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, a 28-year-old transgender woman from Honduras who was raised in Brookline by her adoptive parents.
She’s the White House’s newest staffer, according to NPR, and the first openly transgender person to ever hold a staff position. She’ll serve as an outreach and recruitment director in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel.
Freedman-Gurspan, who worked as a policy adviser for the National Center for Transgender Equality after her stint as the legislative director with Massachusetts Rep. Carl Sciortino’s office, has been living as a woman since her senior year at St. Olaf College.
Freedman-Gurspan was recently in the news after transgender activist Jennicet Gutierrez interrupted President Barack Obama at a White House event. She told the Associated Press that more needed to be done to protect transgender people from violence against violence.
“This is all interesting on paper, to say the least, but we need to see how this actually plays out,’’ she told the AP in June, adding “we don’t think these folks should be in detention centers, period.’’
Though Freedman-Gurspan is the first openly transgender White House staffer, she is not the first to work in the administration. The Washington Post reports that other transgender officials include “Dylan Orr, a former special assistant at the Department of Labor; Chloe Schwenke, senior adviser for LGBT policy and senior adviser to the Bureau on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance; and Shawn Skelley in the Department of Defense.’’
Read the full NPR report here.
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