Rodrigo Lehtinen
American LGBT rights advocate
Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen ( LAY-tən-ən; born April 1, 1986) is an American LGBTQ rights advocate. He is the first openly transgender child of a sitting member of Congress.
Early life and education
Heng–Lehtinen was born in Miami, Florida, on April 1, 1986. He graduated from Palmer Trinity School, where he was active in a dramatic arts club and mountaineering team, served on the Honor Council, and founded a high school chapter of Amnesty International. He attended Brown University, where he began living openly as a transgender man and later came out to his parents.
Career
Heng-Lehtinen was a member of Queer Alliance at Brown University. While attending Brown, he produced the documentary, Free Within These Walls, about Cuban prisoners of conscience. Heng-Lehtinen was a field organizer for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. He was later the membership director at Gender Justice LA, a grassroots organization that works to build the power of the transgender community in Los Angeles through community organizing and leadership development. He also worked in fundraising at Liberty Hill Foundation, organized a transgender leadership development conference with the Transgender Law Center, and served as the membership manager at GLAAD, an LGBTQ media advocacy organization.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rodrigo Lehtinen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.