Andrea Jenkins

(born 1961)

“We don’t just want a seat at the table—we want to set the table.”

Years in political office: 2018–present

Position: vice president of the Minneapolis City Council, 2018–present

Party affiliation: Democrat

Hometown: Chicago, Illinois

Top causes: affordable housing, higher minimum wage, and racial equity

Life Story

Jenkins grew up in the underprivileged neighborhoods of Chicago’s West Side. At six years old, still outwardly presenting as a boy, she was riding the bus with her mom when they saw two drag queens. She felt an inexplicable sense of connection with them, but when she saw that other people on the bus were making fun of the queens, Jenkins resolved to keep her thoughts a secret. “I remember I used to pray, ‘God, why me?’ ” she says. “ ‘You gave me this perfectly male body that some people even envy, but it doesn’t match up with my internal concept of who I am.’ ”

Jenkins’s mother eventually moved the family to a South Side neighborhood where there was less violence. Jenkins caught the attention of her middle school teachers, who helped her enroll in a college prep school. She was a Cub Scout and played football in high school. At eighteen years old, she worked on her first political campaign for Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor. Jenkins would eventually become the president of her University of Minnesota fraternity but was forced out of the brotherhood when another member found her in an intimate situation with a man. She went on to marry a woman, with whom Jenkins would have daughter Nia before the couple divorced.

Jenkins started out her professional career as a writer and eventually went back to school to get not only her bachelor’s degree but a master’s degree in community economic development and a master of fine arts in creative writing. In the late 1970s, when she was in her thirties, she started work as a vocational counselor for Hennepin County (of Minnesota) government. During that time, she encountered the University of Minnesota’s human sexuality program, through which she found educational resources that empowered her to start her own gender transition. “It was there I learned there are many, many, many other people who feel like this, and there’s a process to help you sort of come to a recognition of congruency with your mind and body,” she says. Work colleagues remember how Jenkins’s newfound self-confidence put those around her at ease, even if they didn’t entirely understand the importance of her transition at the time.

By 2001 the openly trans Jenkins was receiving offers to work on political campaigns, and after she helped Minneapolis’s Eighth Ward city council candidate Robert Lilligren get elected, he hired Jenkins to his staff. Later, she worked as an aide to another Eighth Ward council member, Elizabeth Glidden, for eight years. In 2017 she campaigned to become Glidden’s successor and won handily with 73 percent of the votes and many key endorsements from the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. In so doing, Jenkins became the first transgender woman elected to a major US city council—and the first openly transgender Black woman to be elected to public office in the United States. (The first openly transgender woman of color elected was Kim Coco Iwamoto, who had successfully run for Hawai‘i’s Board of Education in 2006.) Phillipe Cunningham, a trans man, won his race to represent the Fourth Ward in the same election. It was a groundbreaking moment for trans representation in the Minneapolis City Council.

Regardless of her many accomplishments in the political world, Jenkins is adamant that her elected office does not define her—and indeed, introduces herself as a poet to new acquaintances. “I always lead with ‘poet,’ because it’s my deep passion to be an artist, an educator, and a humanitarian,” she says. She has a long-term partner and is the grandmother of two.

What’s on Her Agenda

Perhaps it is no surprise that Jenkins has taken the lead on trans issues through her work with the City of Minneapolis. While she was Glidden’s aide, Jenkins was instrumental in creating a transgender issues work group, which developed successful legislation regarding gender-neutral bathrooms and training for law enforcement agents on trans issues. The work was crucial—transgender people in Minnesota, and the country as a whole, face threats of violence and severe discrimination. Jenkins herself has been the target of bigoted comments. The morning after she won her election to the Minneapolis City Council, Minnesota member of the House of Representatives Mary Franson tweeted, “A guy who thinks he’s a girl is still a guy with a mental health condition.” Unfortunately, there was no mistaking who the comment was intended to describe.

But as a legislator, Jenkin’s focus has primarily been on issues of racial and economic inequality. In 2017, through her position as an aide, Jenkins helped the city’s workers win an increase in the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour. As a member of the city council, she has used her background in community economic development to take a leading role in revitalizing Minneapolis’s 38th Street. Jenkins worked on this strategically to prioritize the needs of the majority-POC community that had lived in the area for years and focused on building the strength of existing neighborhood organizations. A writer and performance artist herself, she has also been a strong voice for artists of color and has worked on the issues of youth violence that affected her own childhood in Chicago.

Jenkins has also sought to raise the volume of trans voices beyond politics. She worked for the University of Minnesota—site of one of the country’s first academic health centers that provided trans people with gender confirmation surgery as far back as the 1960s—leading its Tretter Transgender Oral History Project. Jenkins conducted two hundred interviews with trans people from ages eighteen to eighty on their life histories, which, among other things, were used to help write policy to improve the lives of the trans community.

Awesome Achievements

Quotables

“Transgender people have been here forever, and Black transgender people have been here forever.”

“We need people laying on the street in the middle of the freeway saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ but we also need people in city hall, in state legislature, in the White House and in Congress saying those same things.”

“I’m not sure if I would have the same sort of concepts and ideas around human justice if I weren’t transgender.”

“There are moments in history that prove that this grand experiment—that we call the United States—is working.”