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Andrea Jenkins made historical past — once more — when she grew to become the primary brazenly transgender president of a metropolis council in the US.
Minneapolis Metropolis Council members unanimously chose Jenkins on Monday as their president, reported the Star Tribune.
Jenkins first made historical past in 2017, when she grew to become the first openly trans Black woman elected to public workplace within the U.S.
Although there’s at present a record of more than 1,000 LGBTQ people serving in elected workplace throughout the U.S., in response to the LGBTQ Victory Fund, LGBTQ individuals nonetheless make up solely 0.2% of elected officers general.
“I hope that it serves as inspiration for different trans and gender-nonconforming individuals,” Jenkins told NBC News of Monday’s election. “My imaginative and prescient for this council and for the town of Minneapolis is that we come collectively and start the actually important work of therapeutic after our metropolis has been rocked by the homicide of George Floyd and so many different Black and brown individuals who have misplaced their lives by the hands of the state.”
In Might 2020, Floyd — a Black man and a resident of Jenkins’ district — was murdered by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on his neck for a number of minutes as Floyd mentioned he couldn’t breathe. Floyd’s loss of life, caught on video, spurred a world protest motion in opposition to racist police violence.
Days after Floyd’s loss of life, Jenkins, then-vice president of the Metropolis Council, urged her colleagues to declare racism a public health crisis, saying, “We really feel as if there was a knee on all of our collective necks ― a knee that claims Black life doesn’t matter.”
Final yr, Minneapolis voters rejected a ballot measure that referred to as for dismantling the town’s police division and changing it with a brand new division of public security.
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