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Friday, 2 August 2013

Mel Wymore Wants To Change The Way New Yorkers Think About Gender

Posted on 17:37 by Unknown

Running for City Council on New York City’s Upper West Side, Wymore would be the first out transgender person on the council. “You can do almost anything if you feel comfortable in your own skin,” he tells BuzzFeed in an extensive interview.

Mel Wymore Wants To Change The Way New Yorkers Think About Gender

Via: Macey Foronda/Buzzfeed

On September 10, New Yorkers will be casting their primary ballots for city offices — and potentially making history if they elect the first out transgender council member.

Though attention has been focused on the mayoral and comptroller campaigns, the race for the City Council seat on the Upper West Side, District 6, could end with the election of the first out transgender person on council, or in elected office in the state.

Wymore said he sees this race as part of his responsibility to address the issues about gender identity that took him decades to figure out and led to his eventual decision to transition from a woman, while serving as the head of the local community board.

"For people like me who have been very lucky to live in one of the most progressive communities on the planet, where I could be the chair of the community board and announce, 'Hey, I'm transitioning. I'll keep you posted,' ... I realized it's really my responsibility to bring that to other people — to bring that conversation out," he said.

"I have to do that because I don't want to have more people who take 35 years to figure out who they are. I certainly don't want it for my kids."

Out trans public officials are still very rare across the country, with only a handful of known out trans elected officials currently in office — none of whom are in a state legislature or Congress.

"Mel has literally spent decades serving his community and his neighborhood, so he's got the resume you want to see in a city council candidate," Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund vice president of communications Denis Dison said of the group's endorsement of Wymore.

The Victory Fund takes candidates' viability into account, and Dison said the group views Wymore as both viable and the best candidate in a crowded field to take the seat currently held by Gail Brewer.

But, the Victory Fund's primary aim is to increase the prevalence of out LGBT candidates and elected and appointed officials, and Wymore would be a notable change in the elective landscape.

"The fact that he'd also become a high-profile transgender leader is incredibly important," Dison said. "It would give him a level of prominence that probably no trans official has had in the U.S."

Part of the change the Victory Fund hopes to see from out elected officials is an increase in education and awareness about LGBT issues. Talking with BuzzFeed, Wymore made clear he's eager to take on that mantle for out trans officials as he talked about his aims in the race and the long and winding path that led him here and headed — he hopes — to join New York City Council in January 2014.

Via: Macey Foronda/Buzzfeed

BuzzFeed: So, why are you running for City Council?

Mel Wymore: Running for City Council is a very natural progression of the work I've been doing in the community for more than 20 years. I started off very local, organizing my own block to start a food program for tenants of a building across the street who were missing out on services, particularly food and health care. Through that work, I got to know a lot of people in the community. I was asked to sit on Community Board 7, which is our, kind of a mini-City Council about 17 years ago, and I served on many committees after that. Eventually, I chaired the board itself.

Now I have an opportunity to take that knowledge and that experience, and also some of the skills that I have as an engineer, and perhaps bring some new conversations to policymaking [and] the way in which you bring people together to actually design the future as opposed to just advocate for policy on one side or another.

BuzzFeed: There are out gay and lesbian members of City Council, but you would be the first out trans member.

Wymore: I'd be the first out trans member of anything in New York state, in terms of elected office. There are some real role models in the trans world that have been active as district leaders in the Democratic Party or even in local community works in various boroughs, but, for the most part, no one has yet run for elective office in New York state, to our knowledge. You don't always know, because not everyone is out, but no one has run as an openly transgender person.

I'm excited about that, for a couple of reasons. I think that there's an opportunity to really give voice to a community that's really invisible in our society and is just starting to become a known community. And, secondly, because I feel that my perspective actually informs the way we can bring policy to a different level. I'm someone who really has seen many sides of life, and I think I can take on a lot of different perspectives and not just only representing a trans community, but really the whole continuum of what it means to be a human being, from a gender perspective certainly, but also from a perspective of what it means to be mainstream versus what it means to feel marginalized, what it means to feel that you are an activist versus someone who is in the privileged roles. It's probably good to have someone like that on the City Council.

BuzzFeed: We're at a point where there is a growing awareness of trans issues and lives.

Wymore: I started transitioning six years ago, and it's been a tsunami of awareness and change, in terms of the cultural understanding of gender. We have a long way to go because there's still a deep sense of otherness, I think, in people when they respond to meeting someone who is transgender. You actually have to meet [someone who is transgender] personally before that sense of otherness starts to fade.

Then, also, there's the issue of what it means to be transgender, because we live in a very binary society, meaning there's — we really breathe the air of 'there's two sides of the coin, there's the male side and there's the female side,' and so, the notion of a gender continuum is just beginning to become more commonplace in people's understanding and the cultural understanding of gender.

I think it's very exciting how quickly this is changing. It used to be when you saw a child who was "nonconforming," in terms of gender, and there was a path they were going to take. We all have this expectation: "There's a feminine, male-born child. That's gonna be a gay kid," and we have all these expectations of where they're gonna go. And, then there's the tomboy: "The tomboy is going to go through this butterfly transformation and turn into Mulan, who gets married to the prince." Those are the stories that we had, the expectation. And it was still always set in this very binary kind of world. [Now,] we see more and more parents … trying to create safe environments for their children to try and develop however they develop and not try to channel them in a particular path.

At the same time, there are people out there in tremendous pain because they live in a context or a world where it's not so easy to explain who they are, it's not so accepted.


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