Voices of Color: Andrea Jenkins: Trans-Trailblazer, Remarkable-Rolemodel, Activist-Artist
“The amount we love each other is directly proportional
to the amount we love ourselves.” – Andrea Jenkins
As Pride month wraps up, we look at the life and accomplishments of trans-trailblazer, Andrea Jenkins, the first trans woman of color to be elected to public office in the United States. She is a remarkable woman, leader, activist, community historian, poet, and performance artist. She is a true "multi-hyphenate" if there ever was one. This 62-year-old lawmaker has been making history, leading by example in the political world, expressing her thoughts, feelings, and activism through poetry and performance art, contributing to the historical documentation of trans-voices across the country, and even finding time to sit on committees and boards as an advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community. She is truly an amazingly powerful voice in today's world.
Andrea's Story begins in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago. She was assigned male at birth and spent her youth and many of her adult years presenting as male. She was raised by a single mother and lived with her sibling and two cousins. Jenkins referred to her mother as pretty authoritarian but very loving with a strong emphasis on education. She would spend all her weekends at her grandparent's home on Chicago's Southside, a middle-class African American neighborhood. It was a stark contrast to her other home. "We lived in some pretty rough places," says Jenkins of her childhood homes. "I experienced all of Chicago from the deep poverty to the striving middle-class Black Chicago." She said that the experiences from this period in her life, learning about her family history, deeply informed her life for years to come.
Jenkins has said that her path into politics began with her time spent in the history and civics classes at her high school. Her father, a recovering addict, spent most of her childhood and young adult life in prison. "I thought: 'I could be a lawyer and help my dad.' So, it’s really interesting that I am not a law interpreter, but I am a lawmaker now. Those interests of wanting to be a helper, so to speak, helped to shape who I am today," says Jenkins. She got her start in public leadership working as a vocational counselor for Hennepin County, Minnesota, after college. A decade later she would continue her work, but on a more systematic level. This is when she became a policy aide to the Minneapolis City Council; only a few short years before making history in 2017 when she was elected into that government body.
While participating in the Boy Scouts and football, Jenkins was introduced to poetry pretty early on in her life. In first grade, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet laureate of Illinois, Gwendolyn Brooks, visited Jenkins' class. She learned that "everyone can be a poet." At the age of 14, Jenkins was mentored by poet Haki Madhubuti (one of the founders of the Black Arts Movement and Third World Press.) During her time with Madhubuti, she became involved with Black history, Black culture, and the 1960s Black arts movement. She learned that she could use her artistic voice to aid social justice. Poetry is also where she learned she could explore her truest feelings about gender identity and sexuality.
In 1979, Jenkins moved from Chicago to attend the University of Minnesota, a then very overwhelmingly white school for the time. She began to notice the difference in the resources that white students had access to vs. non-white students. She was also a victim of racial stereotyping there. She joined a fraternity, but deep down, she knew that she was very different from her male peers that she lived with. Of her experience there, Jenkins says, “In many ways, a lot of my life was really trying to hide from what I knew to be true inside myself…I knew I was a girl, but I didn’t want people to reject me.” She eventually opened up to a fraternity brother, coming out as a bisexual male. Her brother consequently "outed her" leading to her expulsion. Having nowhere else to go, she returned home and came out to her mother. Her mother accepted her, on the basis of the belief that this was "just a phase." “I knew at this time I was trans, but again I could just not accept it for myself, and so consequently could not tell my parents or anybody about it.”
While still in her 20s and still presenting as male, Jenkins married a woman and had a daughter. She still considers her daughter to be the love of her life. This is when she began working as a vocational Counselor for Hennepin County. She worked there for 10 years, 5 as a man and 5 as a woman. “I just really realized that I [couldn’t] go on anymore, hiding the truth from myself. Hiding the truth from those who I love. If I am going to thrive in life, I have to come to grips with who I am, and I have to accept it,” says Jenkins. At the age of 30, Jenkins divorced her wife and came out as a trans woman. During this time, as Jenkins began her transition, she returned to college and finished her B.A. in Human Services. At 38, she went on to complete 2 more Master's degrees.
“When I first came out, ‘transgender’ was not really a word.
Laverne [Cox] was still in grade school, right?”
-Andrea Jenkins (Them Magazine)
In 2015, Jenkins took a break from politics to help curate the Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota. This project was part of the university's Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies. Her primary focus as curator was to grow the collection of trans narratives by recording oral histories. She recorded oral accounts from up to 300 individuals nationwide, totaling as many as 400 hours of interviews. "It’s so amazing just to have the opportunity to talk to trans, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, gender-fabulous, gender-fluid people from every walk of life. It was an honor to be let into those lives and be able to document and preserve those stories for history. It also was a learning experience for me. I grew." (Jenkins, Them Magazine)
Navigating the dicey arena of politics, Jenkins has said that she has learned the difference between being an advocate and being an activist. "Being an advocate in these rooms is really important, but being an activist is less appreciated, let’s put it that way. And I went in as an activist, so I had to learn to be a little more nuanced, a little more strategic to make changes. I started to understand that politics is really about relationships. They don’t even need to be positive, but you need some kind of relationship to move things forward." says Jenkins (Them magazine.) However, despite the learning curve, she "knew" that she was in the right spaces interacting with state legislators, county officials, senators, and other federal representatives. She learned that she could be an advocate in the government and be an activist in her art.
Jenkins is probably more recently known for playing a key role in the city's response to the murder of George Floyd. " That first week, there were riots. My city burned down. Over $300 million of damage to property in the city. Every two hours I was in a meeting, because I was the Vice-President of the council then, and the President was out of town. It was Memorial Day weekend. So the president was up in the Boundary Waters, which is a state park in Minnesota, way up north — with no service, no internet. So I was effectively the president. We held a press conference in City Hall. Everybody was wearing masks and blah, blah, blah. I had written a little speech, but when I got to the microphone, the only thing that could come out of my mouth was singing “Amazing Grace.” It wasn’t planned. For some reason, I knew that we needed some kind of art in this moment," recalls Jenkins of the experience.
Andrea Jenkins is a powerhouse and trailblazer. She is a phenomenal role model, not only to the trans community but to the broader queer community and world at large. She has so many contributions and accolades under her belt. In 2010, she won the Naked Stages grant from the Jerome Foundations and Pillsbury House Theater with her creation of "Body Parts: Reflections on Reflections." She won the 2011 Bush Fellowship "dedicated to transgender issues." In 2014, she helped establish the Transgender Issues Work Group and organized a City Council summit on transgender equality and the problems facing the transgender community in Minnesota. Jenkins was one of several dozen women featured on the January 29, 2018, Time cover. The article was about the many women who ran for office in 2017 and 2018. In June 2020, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first LGBTQ pride parade, Queerty named her among the fifty heroes "leading the nation toward equality, acceptance, and dignity for all people." In 2022, Fast Company Queer 50 list.
“Trans people have been here since the beginning of human history,
and we are never going away.”
-Andrea Jenkins
In 2022, Andrea Jenkins was reelected and made President of the Minneapolis City Council. While her jurisdiction may be limited, Jenkins continuously hears from transgender people from all over the country seeking guidance and help. And she answers their call. I'd like to leave you with a recording of Andrea Jenkins as she reads one of her poems.
Enjoy! and Happy Pride!
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