Henry Sias, 40, has hit the ground running in a campaign to be elected to the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia. If he succeeds, he will become the first trans judge in the United States of America.
“My name wasn’t always Henry,” Sias narrates in his campaign video.
“Men like me, transgender men, are not supposed to be visible."
He continues: “We have never won an election for state or federal office, let alone judge.”
“One of the things I want to do on the bench is to push self-care and awareness of secondary trauma as a new norm,” the former Yale Law student explains to New Now Next.
“I think self-care is something that lawyers neglect to their own peril and to the peril sometimes of their client.”
Sias, who came out as trans when he was 35, has previously made an unsuccessful bid for court, losing out in 2017 by around 4,000 votes.
“I’m not going to be able to go in there on day one and sort of up turn all the tables,” he says, acknowledging the ways in which the court system can fail queer people.
Still, Sias says that he plans to "refuse to play by the rules, where we all pretend that this is okay, and nobody says what we all know to be true.”
