Meet Rebecca Blankenship, Kentucky's first openly transgender elected official

Two weeks ago, 29-year-old Rebecca Blankenship raised her right hand and placed her left on the personal Jewish study Bible held by one of her children as she was sworn in as a member of the Berea Independent School District's board of education.

She ran for the position last November as a write-in candidate because no one else signed up for the job and she felt the role needed to be filled. Her children and so many others in the town 40 miles south of Lexington need good educations, after all.

"I love my community, and I'm glad that they had confidence in me to do this," she told The Courier Journal.

Her success in the election, when her fellow voters elected her instead of another write-in candidate, also made history in her home state: Blankenship is the first openly transgender person ever elected to public office in Kentucky.

That fact attracted quite a bit of attention. She was on TV in a bunch of states and saw posts people made celebrating her election go viral on TikTok, with hundreds of thousands of views. Friends from high school she hadn't talked to in a decade reached out to say they'd seen posts about her on social media.

"I knew that people in the LGBT community would care a lot about that − would want to see new possibilities open to themselves − and that meant a lot to me," Blankenship said, adding that it was exciting to discover her election also made people who aren't LGBT feel "inspired about the new horizons and possibilities."

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"I just wanted that to be something that people could imagine themselves doing," she told The Courier Journal. "Because when I was a child, that was the furthest thing that you would imagine for a trans person. And I wanted people to be able to have hope for themselves, for lots of things."

Blankenship grew up in the Western Kentucky city of Benton, where she graduated from Marshall County High School. Then she headed to Lexington to study at Transylvania University.

She came out as transgender in late 2012, when she was 19 years old, and left college to spend time getting a sense of who she was and what her values were "apart from the mask I was trying to wear for so many years."

She was the first openly trans person at her university, she said. This was before trans actress Laverne Cox broke out in the hit show “Orange is the New Black” in 2013 and before Olympic champion and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner came out as a trans woman in 2015, both of which increased visibility for trans people.

“It’s an incredibly complex process,” Blankenship said of coming out. “I had no idea what to do. I did not know any trans people at all.”

She went through an intense period of personal reflection after she came out, and she read widely and journaled a lot over the next several years while working different jobs. It was like she was developing a new capacity for introspection she previously had lacked or blocked from developing.

“It's a process of, for the first time, acknowledging who you are at a deeper level rather than trying to go along with the things you’re supposed to go along with to feel comfortable or feel protected,” she said. “And that is the kind of thing that completely transforms a person for their entire life.”

She also found her way to recovery from the drug and alcohol addiction she had experienced for years, which started in the early days of her college career.

She has been sober since March 2016.

“Everybody has their own attitudes and beliefs about recovery, I think. Mine is that the demands of personal growth are all kind of interrelated," she said. "I feel like the development of my introspective capacities, that was enabled by my coming out, in turn facilitated me becoming sober. It was like once I had committed to becoming this new person, then I had to make choices about what kind of person that would be.”

Blankenship returned to Transylvania University in 2017 and graduated in 2019 − the same year she married her wife, Sasha, during a rally for long-sought civil rights protections for LGBT Kentuckians that the Fairness Campaign held inside the Kentucky Capitol.

After graduation, she spent a year or so working in Oregon at a housing authority and got involved in labor organizing before she returned to the commonwealth and settled with her wife and children in Berea.

She’d realized her love of lobbying and campaign work while living out west and pursued that back home in the Bluegrass State.

She soon became the first openly trans person elected by delegates to the Kentucky Democratic Party’s leadership − specifically, the State Central Executive Committee − and began working for Ban Conversion Therapy Kentucky, a nonpartisan, grassroots group that is advocating for a statewide ban on a scientifically discredited practice commonly called “conversion therapy.”

“Conversion therapy” aims to change a person's sexual orientation or their gender identity, and such efforts involve substantial risks of harm for people subjected to it.

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Blankenship is dedicated to the cause of banning “conversion therapy,” and said her commitment is deeply informed by her wife’s experiences as a survivor of that practice, which she was subjected to as a young adult.

“I think most of the things that I have done in Kentucky public life have very obviously been about making a better commonwealth for my kids to grow up in and the next generation of LGBT people to live in,” she said. “All my work is just kind of for that.”

As 2023 gets rolling, Blankenship and the Ban Conversion Therapy Kentucky group will be speaking with state lawmakers about their proposed ban on "conversion therapy" and about other legislation that would affect LGBT people if enacted.

She’s especially looking forward to her new job on Berea’s school board.

Starting out, she has three main goals:

• To support efforts to get teachers the pay raises and support they deserve, and to help ensure they’re shown respect for the valued work they do;

• To improve communication and transparency with students’ parents and schools’ staff concerning available resources, upcoming events and other matters;

• To push for concrete actions that will help give Berea’s students access to vocational education opportunities that are high-quality and closer to home.

“I have a lot to learn, but I am lucky to be a part of a really experienced school board whose members have had children, and in some cases grandchildren, in this school system,” she said. “I feel very supported and excited to serve my community.”

Reach reporter Morgan Watkins at mwatkins@courierjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter: @morganwatkins26.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Rebecca Blankenship, Kentucky's first openly trans elected official