America’s First Transgender Sheriff? Meet New York’s Jillian Hanlon!

Her qualifications and passion have won her broad support.

In 2009, a 42-year-old man snuck a disassembled shotgun into a New York middle school just after classes began. He put it together in a bathroom then took the principal hostage. The school went into lockdown. Kids like seventh-grader Zach Pruner hid under their desks, many in tears, saying they were “frozen with fear.”

Children started sending panicked text messages to parents like Suzanne Mata, who rushed to the school, terrified.

Dutchess County Sheriff’s Deputy Jillian Hanlon rushed too — arriving within minutes to establish a joint command post, implementing “best practices” she had studied for years, taking charge of a chaotic situation. Because of her calm leadership and technical mastery, everyone got on the same page fast.

After more senior officers arrived, she left the command post and set up a joint information center to get accurate information to media and everyone else. As a result, Suzanne and other parents gained confidence their children were safe.

After two hours, the gunman surrendered. Not a shot was fired. Nobody was injured or killed.

Jillian told me on the phone yesterday that her department deserves a lot of credit for defusing a crisis: “Everything Minneapolis and Uvalde did wrong, we did right in Pine Plains.”

She was careful not to take personal credit, stressing she acted as part of a team, but her own leadership clearly played a big role.

That’s not why I called Jillian. We had other things to talk about, like her being transgender.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to live in a world where the cream rises to the top, where people best suited for leadership become leaders? Where race, ethnic background, and LGBTQ status don’t work against outstanding candidates for public office?

I spent 90 minutes on the phone yesterday with Jillian Hanlon, because she’s the first openly transgender person in the U.S. to mount a serious campaign for county sheriff. She’s running in the Hudson Valley’s Dutchess County, where she recently retired from a 24-year career in the sheriff’s department.

I called her because I was fascinated with the idea of an openly transgender sheriff.

But I stayed on the phone to listen to a passionate public servant get super wonky about policy — about the gritty details of serving, making life better for everyone from citizens, to patrol officers, to deputies and inmates at the county jail. I almost forgot to ask her questions about being transgender, though I’m glad I finally did, because her experiences help make her exceptionally well qualified.

Jillian says that if elected, she’ll stress empathy as a key to effective law enforcement.

She wants people to understand she isn’t “soft on crime,” she’s dedicated to enforcing the law in ways that don’t make crime worse, by leveraging empathy and compassion.

She says the primary drivers of crime and disorder are poverty, desperation, and trauma, especially early childhood trauma, which she knows far too much about. More on that in a minute.

Read her own words:

I want to see a more compassionate approach to the problems of crime and disorder. People need to feel safe in their communities in order to thrive. Harsh, punitive approaches to correct criminal behavior rarely succeed … making a more hardened criminal.

We create the conditions for recidivism and an increased risk of violence against the police when we make jail conditions inhumane. Inmates, despite their flaws, are human beings … If we treat people like animals, then they will behave like animals.

If we exploit an inmate’s vulnerability for financial gain, then all we teach an inmate is that exploitation is the norm. The same goes for Correction Officers! These are decent, hard-working people in a dangerous environment, and yet they, too, are treated like an exploitable resource.

Jillian speaks from direct experience.

She’s spent 37 years in public safety — as an ambulance driver, firefighter, EMS tech and 24 years in sworn law enforcement as patrol officer, school resource officer, public information officer, and corrections officer at the jail.

She helped create the Dutchess County Crisis Intervention Training program, the Law Enforcement Critical Incident Stress Response Team, and J-Fire, a non-punitive and multidisciplinary approach to the problem of youth firesetting.

At the jail, she saved the county 1.2 million dollars by identifying a more cost-effective (and more common sense, if you ask me) way to buy and install kitchen equipment. She also found a zero-cost solution to a critical cell-door design flaw that might otherwise have cost millions to correct.

Can Jillian win? That was my first question.

The answer is absolutely yes. Dutchess County has roughly 18,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans, and Jillian is running as a Democrat. The county’s senior leadership has been 100% Republican for decades, but a political analyst I spoke to yesterday says the county is “trending Democrat” and his money is on Jillian.

She hasn’t won the endorsement of police unions, but she says she has significant support in the department anyway, especially among corrections officers. When she was marching in a 4th of July parade, a local police officer told her, “I know you’re going to win,” and said he was looking forward to working with her.

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, Jillian’s gender identity

If I lived in Dutchess County, I’d support Jillian Hanlon for sheriff because of her law enforcement positions and qualifications. As an LGBTQ person, I support her for other reasons, reasons she’s as passionate about as I am.

I’m talking about LGBTQ backlash, trans kids today feeling like aliens — increasingly learning from politicians and thought leaders that they are wrong and shameful. Like me, Jillian never thought she’d see sentiment like that growing and spreading in 2022, but that’s reality in far too much of the U.S.

She says she’s known she was trans since she was four years old. She says the knowledge traumatized her when she realized people wouldn’t accept it. Her own father brutalized her over it for years starting when she was very small, even engaging in “corrective rape.”

She finally came out as trans “on the job,” displaying a tremendous amount of bravery. She leveraged her strong leadership skills, approaching her supervisors and managers one by one to explain and inform. She succeeded. Her transition announcement met with a far more positive response than she had worried about.

She struggled with symptoms of severe PTSD as she transitioned, the process releasing some of her worst childhood memories and trauma, but she worked through that and retired after a long, successful career.

Jillian Hanlon says she’s ready to give back, informed by her own trauma and decades of of hard work in law enforcement.

She’s fiercely intelligent and passionate about policing. She’ll talk your ear off about policy, public safety, best practices, causes of crime, and effective prevention strategies. She’s got facts, figures, academic studies, and tons of personal stories on the tip of her tongue.

She’s quick to talk about how cops often “get it wrong,” to insist officers must exercise empathy and compassion, but she’s just as quick to insist cops deserve empathy and compassion themselves.

That message resonates with the public and her former colleagues.

If elected, she’s going to make one hell of an effective sheriff. She’s also going to become an important role model in New York State and the region — somebody trans kids and all LGBTQ kids can look up to for inspiration and courage, somebody to counter toxic messages so many other leaders are spreading.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to live in a world where the cream rises to the top, where people best suited for leadership become leaders?

I think that’s about to happen in Dutchess County, New York.

Want to know more about Jillian and maybe chip in to her campaign? Click here to visit her website.

James Finn is a columnist for the LA Blade, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Queer Nation and Act Up NY, and an “agented” but unpublished novelist. Send questions, comments, and story ideas to [email protected].

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