Jaelynn Scott won Position 2 in Washington’s 37th Legislative District, which covers Seattle and Renton, and the same voters approved Initiative 638. She is the first openly transgender Black woman elected to a state legislative body in the United States.
She did not wave the first away. “That’s huge. And I don’t want to dismiss that,” Scott said. Then she put it in its place. “I’m not here for myself.”
Initiative 638 restricts transgender girls from competing on girls’ school sports teams, and Washington voters approved it on the same ballot that sent her to the legislature. Her answer to that was a plan rather than a statement. “Look at 638 and know that we’re going to fight, and we’re going to fight hard, to undo it,” she said.
What she ran on is the list most of her district is already living: housing affordability, the cost of childcare, social safety net programs, rent protections, and a review process for young people held in juvenile detention facilities.
So the seat and the fight arrived together. A district sent a Black woman to a state legislature for the first time in the country’s history and, in the same act, handed her the thing she now has to go and undo.
