“We sent an alert on New Year’s Eve that one of our board members got a
federal appointment,” Keisling says. “We never said she was the first
[transgender appointee] ... Dylan wasn’t ducking it [either] — we didn’t
mention [him] because he’s not on our board.”

Any inaccuracies
should be blamed on a 24-hour news cycle desperate to tell a memorable
story, according to Keisling. “[The media] almost demanded that Amanda
be the first, even when neither Amanda or anyone else told them she was
the first.”

Autumn Sandeen, who blogs on transgender issues for
PamsHouseBlend.com, says Simpson’s gender helped push her story
forward: “If Dylan’s story came out first, people still wouldn’t care
because he’s a trans man, and trans men are not looked at as ‘dangerous’
in the way trans women are.”

Gender politics aside, calling
someone the “first” anything is inherently thorny. That’s especially
true when referring to transgender trailblazers, many of who would
prefer to simply be thought of as a man or a woman, rather than a
transgender man or woman. Keisling says there were actually two
transgender men — Kellan Baker and Ejay Jack — who interned for short stints this summer in the White
House. And Sandeen points out that way back in 1996, President Clinton
named Lynn Conway, a transgender woman, to the Air Force Academy Board
of Visitors.

“There are a lot of trans people who are out, but
not out in government, just as there are gay people in Washington who
[aren’t out],” Keisling says. “There’s a difference between not wanting
people to know, not mentioning it, and hiding it. There are probably
people in the government hiding it.”