Lisa Bunker, pioneering transgender politician, adjusts to life as a Sacramento writer

Lisa Bunker wants their books to be read by the masses, not just by transgender people like themselves.

The 61-year-old who moved to Sacramento last year had served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives as one of the first openly transgender people elected to that body. They are also the author of five books, the newest and the focus of their recent reading at Capitol books being “Almond, Quartz, and Finch,” from New Wind Publishing.

“Nobody else is going to read it because it’s one of those books, for those people,” Bunker said early in the reading. “I find it intensely frustrating, because I’m a good writer.”

Sacramento marks the latest chapter for a person who has repeatedly reinvented themselves and forged new paths. And if the response at the reading was any judge, Bunker might already be helping people locally.

Bunker’s background

Before they were an author, an elected official or an out transgender person, Bunker was a longtime program director at WMPG, a community radio station in Portland, Maine.

Through the years, though, Bunker harbored doubts about their gender identity that had been with them since early childhood.

They talked about their upbringing in Southern California during the 1960s for a 2017 interview for an oral history project for University of Southern Maine. “I was born with a male body and was raised as a boy and in retrospect looking back I definitely was a trans-girl from the very beginning,” Bunker said then.

Sam Bullock got to know Bunker through training under them at the radio station and while Bunker was in the process of their initial transition from male to female. Bunker now identifies as nonbinary, using they/them pronouns as well as three they have created and include in writing: vo, ven and veir. They use the custom pronouns on occasion with people close to them.

Bullock loved Bunker almost immediately.

“One thing that I found really awe-inspiring about Lisa – and how I strive to be and never get it right in my own life, but I use Lisa as an example – is that they are unapologetically themselves,” Bullock said.

Dr. Wendy Chapkis, a professor of women’s studies at University of Southern Maine praised Bunker’s approach to conversation, even with potential adversaries.

“I tend to be someone that I think, ‘Oh, that person is never gonna get it,’ or ‘That person is super transphobic, I’m going to avoid them,’” Chapkis said. “But Lisa would be the person that would have a conversation in the most disarming way and often create some kind of inroad with that person.”

This quality might have helped Bunker get elected to the New Hampshire State House in 2018 after they relocated to be with their wife Dawn Huebner.

Politically, New Hampshire is its own animal, with a well-known role early in the presidential primary cycle. It also has a highly representative form of government, with 400 house reps in a state of about 1.4 million people. That works out to about one rep for every 3,500 residents, a stark difference from the California Assembly, which averages one member per 465,000 residents.

Bunker, who was motivated to run for office after Donald Trump’s presidential election in 2016, got to work in their town of Exeter.

“I canvassed,” Bunker said in a sitdown interview for this article two days before their reading. “I walked neighborhoods. I talked to a 10th of my constituents. It was pretty cool.”

Bunker took office along with Gerri Cannon, becoming the first two openly transgender women to serve in the New Hampshire State House, according to local reporting at the time.

Of their time in office, Bunker said they were most proud of helping to overturn a gubernatorial veto of ending the death penalty in New Hampshire. Lawmakers overrode the veto by one vote. “I feel like that was a really important day to have gotten elected and shown up,” Bunker said.

Bunker left office when they and Huebner decided to move to California.

“This has been our kind of adventure,” Huebner said. “We wanted to try something new.”

Life in Sacramento

Bunker and Huebner, who are Unitarian-Universalists, chose Sacramento in part because of its faith community. Incidentally, New Wind Publishing co-owner Anara Guard is also board president for the group Bunker and Huebner have joined, the Unitarian-Universalist Society of Sacramento.

Guard said that Bunker and Huebner, who have been in Sacramento for just over a year, were already integral members of the local UU society.

“Lisa and Dawn were ready, willing right from the start,” Guard said.

Huebner, a psychologist who has authored 14 books and contributed text for a recent Curious George book about calmness, said that her royalties are largely helping to support her and Bunker right now.

In the meantime, Bunker is working to reach new audiences, with the crowd at the Capital Books reading small. Aside from Bunker, Huebner, Guard and a reporter, there were about half a dozen people, with the event drawing transgender people, their family and a man who had questions about how to support a child who had come out.

Those in the room also had plenty to say about the experience of transgender people in the current political climate.

“As a trans person, why do you think they care so much,” one man asked Bunker.

“Because we’re terrifying to them,” Bunker replied.

“Nobody is absolutely binary,” Bunker added shortly thereafter. “And in order to deeply commit to a binary belief system, you have to suppress something inside yourself.”

A little while later, the man’s transgender daughter spoke up.

“We’re ordinary, we’re not scary,” she said. “We’re average people.”

Just as the event had ended, Bunker said it hadn’t been the first time that the only people who’d shown up to one of their events had either been a transgender person or someone who supported them.

Bunker wasn’t letting this faze them, though.

“Everyone needs to know that they’re supported and loved and not alone in their struggles,” they said.