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Sarah Brown

Sarah Brown

Sarah Brown

Sarah Brown is a former British Liberal Democrat politician and current transgender activist. She was the Cambridge City Councillor for Petersfield ward between 2010 and 2014, when she lost her seat.

While on the Council, she was Executive Councillor for Community Wellbeing for 2013-14 and also served as a member of the LGBT+ Liberal Democrats executive. During her time on the Council, she was the only openly transsexual elected politician in the UK.

In 2011, she appeared on the Independent on Sunday “Pink List” (now the “Rainbow List”) as the 28th most influential LGBT person in the UK, dropping to 34th in the 2012 list, then rising again to 27th in the 2013 list.

Sarah is an advocate for equal marriage, and has several discussed marriage laws as they affected her on numerous occasions. Her case (in which she was forced to divorce in order to receive a Gender Recognition Certificate) was cited during the report stage of the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill, when her MP Julian Huppert moved a series of amendments; which included a set intended to allow couples who dissolved their marriages under the Gender Recognition Act to retroactively restore their marriage.

Sarah is an advocate for improved provisions for transgender people under the National Health Service. She created the “#transdocfail” hashtag on Twitter and collated several thousand tweets talking about abuse of transgender patients. These tweets exposed the institutional transphobia in the medical profession.

She lives in Cambridge in a polyamorous relationship with her wife, Sylvia, and fellow activist Zoe O’Connell.