In brief
Raffi Freedman-Gurspan came to public life through transgender advocacy and legislative staff work in Massachusetts. In 2015 she joined the White House as its first openly transgender staff member.
Unable to be raised by her birth family, she was adopted as an infant by an American Jewish couple and raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, where she attended the Edward Devotion School and Brookline High School.
She later led external relations at the National Center for Transgender Equality. The career is short on theatrics and long on the unglamorous work of making government see people it had ignored.
Photographs
Hero photograph: Wikimedia Commons
