Berea elects first openly transgender elected official in Kentucky history
Voters in Berea made history, electing an openly transgender person to office for the first time in Kentucky history.
Rebecca Blankenship won a write-in race on Tuesday to become a member of the Berea Community School Board. The Richmond Register reported that she won the seat with 55 votes. The Fairness Campaign, a statewide LGBTQ advocacy group, wrote in a post on Facebook that Blankenship is the first openly transgender elected official in Kentucky.
But when Blankenship first filed to run she wasn’t sure that she’d even be a barrier breaker. Blankenship said she ran to better her children’s schools, not necessarily to make history.
“I really filed because I wanted to make sure that every child in the Berea Community Schools has an opportunity to get a great education,” Blankenship said in an interview Wednesday. “But it is pleasing to me that, as a side effect, that now possibilities are opened up for every LGBT child in Kentucky as well. I think that it is often more difficult to be first, simply because people have not yet had the capacity to imagine.”
Blankenship said she decided to file to run as a write-in candidate after noticing initially that only two candidates had filed to run for three open positions on the board. All seven of Blankenship’s stepchildren have attended school in the district and four are currently enrolled.
“I thought that this was a good opportunity to do that, to make sure that the next school board is one that is responsible and oriented toward all of our students needs,” Blankenship said.
As part of her campaign, Blankenship wrote notes and her phone number on every piece of mail she sent out in large part because she feels that people “deserve to have access to their representatives on a very regular basis.”
“I think that people responded to that,” Blakenship said. “...Berea is a small community and people thrive on trust.”
On the board, Blankenship said she wants to focus on things like raising teacher pay to help increase retention in the district, increasing vocational education opportunities and helping the district work on transparency and communication.
“Communication is one of the key parts that leads to family engagement, which is one of the most important things in determining student success,” Blankenship said.
Blankenship, a Marshall County native, is the executive director of Ban Conversion Therapy Kentucky, an organization dedicated to protecting minors “from harmful attempts to ‘change’ their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression through public education and advocacy, and community building with others across the Commonwealth,” according to the group’s website.
“I don’t particularly take joy in being first except in that nobody has to be first ever again,” Blankenship said in a release on Tuesday. “Tonight, Kentucky’s LGBT and questioning kids can dream about a future that includes them a little bit more than it did yesterday.”
This story was originally published November 9, 2022 at 12:07 PM.