Transgender Alder-Elect Triumphed Over Whispers

After months of tireless teamwork, Devin Avshalom-Smith was cruising to election. Then the whispers and texts started.

The whispers spread the word that he is transgender.

The texts linked to this 2009 article about the candidate’s painful confrontation with bigotry as an undergraduate sorority member at George Washington University.

Avshalom-Smith had won a competitive three-way Democratic primary against a party-endorsed candidate for the vacant Ward 20 alder seat. His gender didn’t come up at that time.

He was far ahead in a two-way race for the Nov. 2 general election. Less than two weeks remained until election day. Now the one potential block to victory — in a neighborhood where an LGBT alder felt in the 1980s he had to spend years in the closet because of prejudice — had emerged.

He had to decide how to confront it.

Make a speech? Issue a statement?

Or talk to people one on one?

He chose the latter response— and he prevailed. After the polls closed, Avshalom-Smith defeated unaffiliated candidate Addie Kimbrough 427 – 45 (counting both machine votes and absentee ballots). The victory margin is expected to grow by as much as 70 votes once absentee ballots were counted. Avshalom-Smith will become the first known transgender New Haven alder.

The victory was an affirmation. His neighbors’ outpouring of support felt good.

Still, the injection of the gender issue in the race’s last two weeks took a toll: ​“Yeah, I’m a person. When someone cuts you, it hurts. I know that my mission, what I’m here to do for my community, is much bigger than my personal life,” Avshalom-Smith said Thursday during an interview on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

“It was a really hard time for me. It’s personal private information. I didn’t see how it was relevant to the alder race. [But] the reaction I got was overwhelming support and love from the young folks, older folks. Obviously not everyone agrees and is on the same page. But primarily people welcomed me into their homes and hugged me and said, ​‘Look your personal life is your personal life. I want to make sure you address that cracked sidewalk.’”

In deciding how to respond to the whisper/text campaign, Avshalom-Smith said, he sought to avoid elevating his personal life above the pressing issues that merited discussion in the campaign, like public safety and blight and jobs.

“I had one-on-one conversations with my supporters, with residents of the ward, talking to them, asking them how they felt [about his being transgender], assuring them my agenda will always be a community-first agenda. I’m the same person today that I was yesterday. I’m the same person that during the pandemic walked door to door handing out flyers, lifting food pallets in order to feed more than a quarter million meals to our neighborhood with very little help. I’m the same person who has a big heart and love for my neighborhood.”

The message resonated. Avshalom-Smith, who is 32, grew up in Newhallville and in Hartford. He lives in the Starr Street home that his grandparents originally purchased and passed down in the family. He founded the Newhallville Community Action Network and serves as secretary of Newhallville’s Community Management Team, where he has helped up the group’s digital game. (Members of the team worked hard on his campaign, including his campaign manager, Jeanette Sykes.) He volunteered in aid efforts during Covid-19. In his day job, he serves as an aide to State Rep. Robyn Porter and clerk of the legislature’s Labor and Public Employees Committee.

So he was already a known entity in the community.

A few people in the campaign’s final weeks accused him of not being ​“honest” about who he is by failing to issue public statements about being transgender.

He didn’t buy it.

“We don’t go out — we used to have to — we don’t go out and make a speech, ​‘I’m Black, so please don’t count me out because of that.’ It was the same for me. I really felt like it’s not a part of the community first agenda. That’s what I focused on,” he said.

“I’m proud of who I’ve become … I wasn’t hiding. I’m just a person living my life. I put my pants on one leg at a time just like everybody else. In this world we’re living in, so many things are used to sensationalize and divide us. What we need now is healing. What we need now is togetherness. That’s something I can always commit myself to.”

Asked about the issue Thursday, Kimbrough, Avshalom-Smith’s opponent in Tuesday’s election said, ​“No comment. I’m done. You won’t get no comment from me.”

Avshalom-Smith said he found the emergence of the issue in the final two weeks ​“shocking.”

“Something that really ended up [leading] to progress back in D.C. was being used to try to harm me,” he said. ​“More than anything it hurt because it was being used as a political tool. … Just a few weeks ago our first-graders were playing at Lincoln Bassett School and there was active shooting. A couple of weeks later a rogue pit bull bit one of our children. All I could think was: ​‘This is probably the least important thing going on, my private personal life.”

Avshalom-Smith said he’s excited to get to work as an alder. He’s hoping to see pandemic-relief American Rescue Act dollars flow to Newhallville to boost job-training and youth development, perhaps as part of a plan to revive the vacant former state welfare building on Bassett Street.

A member of the Civilian Review Board, he hopes to contribute to the debate over how to improve public safety and police-community relations. He aims to address the issue he heard most of all on the campaign trail: quality-of-life concerns over overgrown trees, blighted houses, broken sidewalks.

“I just ask everyone,” he said, ​“to look at me and what I do.”

Click on the video to watch the full interview with Alders-Elect Devin Avshalom-Smith and Shafiq Abdussabur about their recently completed campaigns and their plans for their first terms in office.