The first ever openly transgender White House LGBT liaison is anxiously awaiting a job offer from President-elect Donald Trump.
With one week left before Trump’s Inauguration, Raffi Freedman-Gurspan has had no contact with the president-elect’s transition team.
Freedman-Gurspan, 29, was tapped by outgoing President Barack Obama to fill the influential position as his liaison to the LGBT community.
Freedman-Gurspan, a biological man who identifies as a transwoman, is concerned that the White House may “lose touch, ultimately, with what is going on [in the gay community]. We lose that ability to inform our president about our community and our needs”.
Following the gay nightclub massacre in Orlando, Freedman-Gurspan worked the phones establishing contacts within the Orlando gay community and relaying Obama’s concerns from the golf course.
“To call agencies and say, ‘This matters to the president, ultimately,’ it’s an incredibly influential position.”
Freedman-Gurspan fears that the incoming president will slam the door on LGBTQ issues similar to the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. Reagan, in particular, is blamed for the government’s slow response to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
“It actually gives me a little bit of chills thinking about not having a potential person here, if, God forbid, we have another outbreak of, say HIV or AIDS or something like that,” Freedman-Gurspan said in an interview with Buzzfeed blog.
Gurspan, whose birth name is Rafael, was adopted from the Honduras by a single Jewish woman and raised in Brookline, Mass.
