The White House Just Hired Its First Openly Transgender Official

 

The White House has hired its first openly transgender staff member, a former activist who started working in the West Wing on Monday. Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, who previously served as a policy adviser at the National Center for Transgender Equality, will work as a director of outreach and recruitment for the White House personnel office, the Wall Street Journal reports. Valerie Jarrett, a White House senior adviser, said in a statement that Freedman-Gurspan “demonstrates the kind of leadership this administration champions.”

The Obama administration has taken recent steps to promote transgender rights. Last month, President Barack Obama signed an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of gender identity, while the Department of Defense announced that transgender people would be allowed to serve openly in the military by early next year.

But the White House has also faced criticism for not doing enough, as transgender women face disproportionately high rates of violent crime as well as abuse in prisons and immigration detention centers. In June, just two days ahead of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on marriage equality, Obama was heckled by Jennicet Gutiérrez, an undocumented transgender activist, during his speech at a gay pride event. “I am a trans woman!” she yelled at the president, denouncing the treatment of transgender women in immigration detention centers. “No more deportation!”

Gutiérrez was promptly escorted from the room. “I am just fine with a few hecklers, but not when I’m up in the house,” Obama said with a smile. “Shame on you, you shouldn’t be doing this,” he added, before the crowd began chanting his name. Some LGBT activists did not approve of his response, with one onlooker describing his treatment of Gutiérrez as “heartless.”

Freedman-Gurspan, who was adopted from Honduras and raised by a single mother in Massachusetts, has also criticized Obama’s immigration policies in the past. Following the gay pride event, immigration officials issued new guidelines calling for better treatment of transgender detainees. “This is all interesting on paper, to say the least, but we need to see how this actually plays out,” Freedman-Gurspan told the Associated Press of the new guidelines. “We don’t think these folks should be in detention centers, period.”

 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate