When Kim Coco Iwamoto decided to run for the Hawaii Board of Education, even her father didn’t give her much chance of winning.  But she did, becoming the highest-ranking openly transgender elected official in the United States.  

Iwamoto sat down to talk with HRC’s Equality Magazine for an interview that is excerpted on HRC Back Story, the blog of the Human Rights Campaign:

You wear so many hats in your community. In testifying before Hawaii’s House of Representatives for the state’s civil rights bill, you could have spoken as a civil rights attorney, an activist, a licensed therapeutic foster parent or as a business owner. Yet you testified in your official capacity as a member of the state Board of Education. Why?

Because it provided an important perspective at the hearing. As a Board member, I had access to statewide surveys that indicated that 13.3 percent of our high school students reported that they had been harassed because someone thought they were gay, lesbian, or bisexual and 18.5 percent of our public high school students seriously considered committing suicide. This is the highest rate in the nation.

The State of Hawai`i serves over 45,000 high school students. This means that over 6,000 students are being harassed because someone thought they were gay, lesbian or bisexual, and more than 8,000 students have seriously considered committing suicide in the past year. Even if only 13.3 percent of these 8,000 students who seriously considered committing suicide did so because they could not endure the homophobic harassment, we still have 1,100 children in anguish every year.

I testified as a Board Member to remind the legislators about these 1,100 students. I wanted the legislators to fully understand that if they continued to deny equal rights to gay and lesbian families, they would continue to legitimize the homophobia behind the harassment that these students were experiencing in our high schools.