Marisa Richmond, DNC delegate and LGBT activist.

The 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver will be a ‘first’ in many important ways: it will certainly be the first major party convention to nominate either a woman or an African American for president.

But DNC 2008 will be notable for some other firsts as well: it will be the first major party convention at which an openly transgendered woman of color will be seated as a delegate, the New York Blade reports. An African American woman from Tennessee, Marisa Richmond has been named a delegate by Howard Dean. “I plan to use this opportunity to every chance I get talk about inclusion, diversity and how all GLBT people — including trans people — are victims of discrimination and hate crimes and why it’s so necessary for the Democratic Party to stand up for what’s right,” she told the Blade.

The Democratic National Committee chair has also named Diego Sanchez — a Latino transman from Massachusetts — to the platform committee — one of the convention’s standing committees; he will also be seated as an at-large delegate in Denver.

While Marisa is supporting Hillary Clinton and I’ve endorsed Barack Obama, we have worked together in the past and will continue to do so — happily — in the future, as friends and colleagues in the movement.

In 2005, Marisa and I co-facilitated a workshop on feminism and transgender (”Transfeminism: Activism, Identity, and History Across Gender”) at the Berkshire Women’s Conference, which was held at Scripps College (in the Claremont Cluster) in California in June of that year.

And we will see each other again this week in Tucson when we both attend the 22nd Annual Conference of the
International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE 2008), where Marisa will be doing a workshop on “Building & Maintaining a Support Group” and I’ll be doing a workshop on “Making Diversity Real: Transgendered People of Color & the Transgender Movement.”

Marisa is president of the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition and she represents TTGPAC in the Equality Federation, which include statewide LGBT advocacy organizations across the country; I represent the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) in the Federation.

Marisa also serves on the board of directors of the Tennessee Equality Project (another Equality Federation member organization) and (like me) is a member of the board of advisors of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE). Last August, Marisa and I co-facilitated a workshop on transgender issues at the annual summer meeting of Albuquerque for board and staff members of Federation member organizations.

Marisa, who has a Ph.D. in history from George Washington University, teaches history at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro.