History In The Making.

Now that the November elections are behind us a new crop of legislators taking their seats history is going to be made as trans legislators begin their work.

Transgender state representatives poised to make history
WMUR
Associated Press
December 26, 2018

CONCORD, N.H. —
Two New Hampshire politicians will make history next week when they're sworn in as the state's first openly transgender women to serve in the State House.

The Portsmouth Herald reports Gerri Cannon and Lisa Bunker will represent Somersworth and Exeter respectively when they take office on Jan. 2. Stacie Laughton became the first openly transgender lawmaker elected in New Hampshire in 2012. However, Laughton never took office because of a felony conviction.

Not all news coverage was good…

Two Transgender Representatives About To Join New Hampshire Legislature
New Boston Post
December 24, 2018

Two biological men who identify as women plan to join the New Hampshire House of Representatives in January 2019 — and they’ll make up half of the openly transgender state legislators in the nation.

State representative-elect Gerri Cannon (D-Somersworth) plans to file a bill that would allow transgender people to change the sex listed on their birth certificates.

Seacoast Online reported,

“I don’t identify myself as a trans person going to Concord, but I am a trans person in Concord,” Bunker said during a sit-down interview with Seacoast Media Group alongside Cannon. “It is important to represent. One way I think we can do that (is) to look at legislation from a trans person’s point of view, or an LGBT person’s point of view, and ask if there’s something people are missing here because they just don’t know.”
[…]
Cannon made her first foray into political office last year when she was elected to the Somersworth School Board, but she has long been involved in public discourse. She’s testified several times about transgender issues before the Legislature, and she said seeing the political process up close got her motivated to give it a go herself.

“There’s a lot more things than just the transgender community,” Cannon said. “As I sat in other sessions in the House, I realized there were a lot of things I had an opinion about. There were a lot of health and human services issues.”

There are something like five trans persons that were elected in November. Liz Lyke and Kathy Ottersten were elected in Fairbanks Alaska, and in Colorado Brianna Titone, according to the New York Times there also were at least 153 LGBTQ candidates elected last November.

I met Gerri Cannon at Fantasia Fair in October, she gave a noon Keynote address.