Education

Meet The First Transgender Woman To Be Named A Rhodes Scholar


Hera Jay Brown was flying home on a plane equipped with in-flight WiFi late Monday night, when she got a message via Facebook Messenger.

Yet another reporter was reaching out, asking about an event this past weekend that she was quoted as saying was “breathtaking,” and “an honor,” in articles by NBC News, The Guardian and even The New York Times. All the coverage was a bit overwhelming, she told this reporter, but also, “It’s amazing.”

As it turns out, this reporter who interrupted her in-flight entertainment was me. Brown told me it all started with a flight from Malta to Chicago late last week.

The 23-year-old woman from Corryton, Tenn., had traveled more than 5,000 miles for what may have been the most important interview of her life. The Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude graduate of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville is a Fulbright-Schuman Fellow specializing in forced migration and asylum. Brown’s studies have led her to Egypt, Jordan, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Malta, Lithuania, the United Kingdom and across the United States, primarily to research the experiences of Syrian refugees.

At 4 o’clock on Saturday, Brown said she and 15 other scholars sat together waiting for the results of interviews conducted simultaneously in 16 cities across the U.S. by the Committees of Selection for the Rhodes Trust.

“As the committee deliberated, all 16 finalists waited in a room together, myself included,” Brown recalled. “After nearly four hours, the committee came back and announced the election of myself and Rossella Gabriele. I was utterly stunned.”

Brown and Gabriele are among 32 college students selected after two days of interviews with 236 applicants from 90 different colleges and universities, all of whom who had reached the final stage of the competition. These numbers are significant:

  • More than 2,900 students applied
  • 963 received a recommendation from 298 different colleges and universities
  • The 100 students chosen from the United States and more than 60 countries around the world will attend Oxford University, all expenses paid, for at least two years, beginning in October 2020.
  • There have been 3,516 American Rhodes Scholars, representing 324 colleges and universities, since Rhodes Scholarships were created in 1902 in the will of British businessman and Oxford alum Cecil Rhodes.
  • Women have only been eligible to apply since 1976
  • 588 American women have now won the coveted scholarship.

But until Saturday, there had never, ever been even one transgender woman elected a Rhodes Scholar. The first one is Hera Jay Brown.

On Sunday, as news circulated about her achievement, Brown tweeted how significant this is, both to her and to the community of transgender women that had never before been recognized like this.

And given the oppression that this community faces all around the world and online, there were of course haters, crude commenters and transphobes aplenty, calling her a “dude,” a “guy” and attacking her in other ways. But Brown took it all in stride, and showed the trolls she has sass to go along with her smarts.

In our online conversation Monday night, Brown told me she came out to her family in 2013, at the age of 17. Acknowledging her authentic gender identity cost Brown everything, but as she told NBC News earlier Monday, her experience inspired her to pursue the study of forced migration and asylum.

“I remember growing up with a loving, supportive family, with a stable reality and having all that kind of yanked away in an instant,” said Brown. “I know what it’s like to lose a home. I know what it’s like to be blocked from access to medical care and what it means to physically leave the place you’ve always known, and that’s become a rallying point for me to connect and learn with people who’re facing this and to look deeper into the kind of social structures that allow for people to be displaced.”

Seeking a full ride scholarship is easy to understand. But why study at Oxford?

“While working in Jordan, I was able to collaborate with scholars from Oxford, and it struck me that Oxford was a place where I could not only study the theoretical grounding for how to address the broken system for refugees that we have around the world today, but that there were people there who were able to transition the theoretical into actual policy implementation,” Brown told NBC’s Gwen Aviles.

So she took a shot. She said she was impressed by her competition from Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Tennessee, when they gathered Saturday in Chicago.

“I’m still struck now at the amount of talent that I met while I was there, the people that are doing incredible amazing things and will continue to do so,” Brown told NBC.

“I was so incredibly humbled to go around and sit in a room with people who have devoted their life to any number of passions, who are trying to use their positions to affect positive change in the world and to realize that I was the one who was selected.”

Hera Jay Brown to NBC Out’s Gwen Aviles

As I read that article, among others, as well as a press release, I learned some key details: two non-binary Rhodes Scholars were also selected for 2020, and that this new class had, for the third year in a row, a majority of minority students. Half are first generation Americans.

Also, Brown made it clear to me, and on Twitter, she isn’t the first transgender Rhodes Scholar, just the first trans woman. Before Brown, two previous scholars who identify as trans men received this honor.

I chatted briefly with the first one, Pema McLaughlin of California. He graduated from Reed College in Oregon in 2016, majored in religion, and he studied Buddhism at Oxford. Calvin Runnels of Louisiana was selected in 2018 and he studied biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. As his alma mater’s college newspaper reported, he’s spending his life, learning about life and its origins. Also, he made headlines in June when he was arrested during a Jewish-led protest at the White House to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the Homeland Security agency responsible for so much controversy at the U.S. southern border, as Forbes.com’s senior contributor Bruce Japsen reported in June.

Her proud alma mater reported that following her graduate studies at Oxford, Brown plans to pursue a law degree in the U.S. and eventually start a law firm that provides specialized legal counsel to asylum seekers.

But what I hadn’t read anywhere was an answer to a question that had formed in my mind the more I dug into Brown’s story, one that compelled me to reach out to Brown late Monday night. And to my delight, she answered.

We both came out as trans women in the very same year, at vastly different ages, to vastly different worlds, and yet we both experienced rejection, displacement, and struggled to find our way. But we did more than that, we made our own way.

When she came out 6 years ago, it wasn’t as easy, said Brown, to express herself as well as she does now.

“I didn’t have as succinct a vocabulary and idea, as I do now, but the roots were there. It’s a process. Unlearning, relearning.”

What we unlearn and relearn through that process, and by simply surviving, is something that I share in my professional and personal life. As does Brown: “I remain committed to advancing dignity, representation, and respect for all trans people throughout the world,” she told me.

I asked Brown, what message did she want to send to transgender youth, when they learn of her becoming a Rhodes Scholar-elect? Here’s her answer:

“To trans youth, I want y’all to know that no matter what, your community and chosen family are waiting for you, even if you don’t know us yet. We are here to welcome and celebrate each of you, myself included. I’m always here if y’all ever need a comforting voice.”

Hera Jay Brown

I’m not going to lie, that brought a tear to my eye. Brown may be the first out trans woman Rhodes Scholar in 117 years, but I have no doubt she will not be the last.





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