This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter.
The first openly transgender person elected to a California school board is sitting in a booth at Bartel’s Giant Burger — a 1970s-era roadside joint a few miles from downtown Redding in Shasta County.
Mountains rise to the west and north. Big rigs rumbling up Interstate 5 can be heard in the distance.
Bobbie Simpson, 18 months into her first term on the board of the Gateway Unified School District, has flowing red hair and glasses with bright yellow frames. She said she likes Bartel’s because it’s “authentic” and the milkshakes are good.
Being authentic is something Simpson, 48, says she also values about herself.
Bobbie Simpson with her, son, Michah Simpson, during his high school graduation ceremony in early June.Credit: Courtesy of Bobbie Simpson
With the support of her wife and two children, she’s been fully out as a trans woman since 2023 in this conservative part of California replete with Trump flags, a highly influential 8,000-member Christian mega church and an active chapter of Moms For Liberty.
Coming out as an openly transgender person — let alone one involved in public education — hasn’t been easy. Simpson was publicly demeaned by a county education official before she ran for office, and is the subject of at least one internet meme.
Yet as Simpson sat in Bartel’s recently, occasionally dipping a fry into her shake, she was matter-of-fact about her emergence as a public official.
Perhaps the biggest deal about Simpson being California’s first elected transgender school board member — at a time when school policies about transgender students and athletes are being widely and hotly debated — is that it’s proving not to be a big deal, even in deeply red Shasta County.
Gateway Unified’s board meets in a small room behind the district’s bus garage, not far from an indoor shooting range in a sprawling industrial area.
At a recent meeting, Simpson and her four colleagues breezed through a light agenda. The meeting was informal. The roll was called by first names. One board member voted yes by saying “yup.”
The district’s most recent large project was moving several grades into different school buildings, a process that went well, board members said.
Simpson’s tenure has drawn praise for being student-centered and helping the district of 2,000 students — most of whom are white and economically disadvantaged — find equilibrium after several years of leadership tumult.
Simspon said she’s achieved success as a board member because “I’ve never made it about me or who I am,” she said.
In an interview, Superintendent Kyle Turner said Simpson “has really kept students in the forefront.”
The secretary of the Shasta County Republican Central Committee, Bruce Ross, who’s on a school board in a neighboring district, also gave Simpson high marks.
She’s built a reputation as “a good board member who reads the packets, asks questions, plays well with others and cares about kids,” he told EdSource.
But a group that advocates for “God’s Design for Life, Family & Liberty,” is also watching Simpson’s rise.
The California Family Council “has no formal position” on LGBTQ+ people serving on school boards, its spokesperson Greg Burt said.
“Of course, we disagree on the ideology about identity that undergirds those who choose to identify as LGBTQ+,” he said. “Many in the Redding area base their identity not on their naturally occurring desires and feelings, but on their religious faith teachings.”
Getting out of Trinity
Simpson was born in Grand Junction, Colorado, an only child.
Her father worked for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Her mother was a soil conservationist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The family moved a lot, Simpson said, including to Arizona and Hollister in San Benito County. When she was a fifth grader, they settled in Lewiston, a tiny, isolated town in Trinity County, west of Shasta.
Simpson struggled as a student, and attended only one semester at Trinity High School in Weaverville, the county seat, she said. She finished at an alternative high school and eventually received an equivalency diploma. She said she wanted what every kid in Trinity wanted back then — “to get out.”
Compared to Weaverville, let alone Lewiston, Redding seems like a metropolis. Simpson gravitated there, taking classes at Shasta Community College but not graduating.
She lived for a while on an inheritance after her father died, has been on disability, worked at an auto wrecking yard and as a library aide. She’s now working as an at-home care provider for the elderly.
Hanging out with friends in Redding, Simpson met Athena, the woman she married 29 years ago.
Becoming Bobbie
For years, Simpson kept a secret.
“I knew who I was when I was younger, but I also hid it,” Simpson said. “I told my wife when we were 20-something. She accepted it.”
Occasionally, Simpson would wear women’s clothes when the couple went out. But she mostly remained closeted. She said she experienced gender dysphoria, defined as the distress some transgender people feel because of the mismatch between their gender identity and their bodies or how others perceive them.
“This is not a fun time,” she said. “It’s feeling like who you are, and your body are not matching. It’s so uncomfortable (that) I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”
Around 2017, she told her wife that she wished she could just dress as a woman more frequently.
Her wife replied, “Why can’t you?’ ” Simpson said, “I had no answer for that.”
Simpson started dressing more femininely around town but not at school events. “I really kept in very small circles,” she said.
Bobbie Simpson during a Gateway Unified School District Board meeting in May.Credit: Timbre Beck / EdSource
Eventually, the day came when Simpson went to school to pick up a child while wearing women’s clothes. “I let people at my kid’s school see who I am,” she said.
Another parent, Caroline Shufelberger, who describes herself as a “lesbian mom in a modern family,” saw Simpson for the first time as a woman.
“I told her she looked really pretty,” Shufelberger told EdSource. They fell into a conversation about the school district. A friendship blossomed.
Around this time, school districts around the country were debating vaccination policies and policies regarding transgender and nonbinary students. Some of these debates were playing out at Gateway, where the local chapter of Moms For Liberty, a national group that defines itself as “fighting for the survival of America” by defending parents’ rights “at all levels of government,” had some influence.
In December 2022, the school board fired the superintendent without cause. The school board president later resigned. The board also pulled back on programs like social emotional learning and others that supported students with learning differences.
Schufelberger invited Simpson to a parent meeting about what was happening.
Simpson went and learned that the school board was “trying to dismantle a lot of the supports that kept my family together.” The more she learned, the more active she became.
Once she started going to meetings, “Bobbie never looked back,” Shufelberger said.
At board meetings, Simpson often spoke about the programs she cared about. And when the board discussed policies affecting LGBTQ+ students, Simpson made it clear she was speaking as a transgender person.
Two things happened when Simpson attended aMay 2023 meeting of the Shasta County Board of Education, which often deals with special education issues.
First, county board member Authur Gorman(pronounced “author”) came over to Simpson during a break and misgendered her multiple times, referring to her with male pronouns, according to people there.
Second, Simpson immediately received support from others at the meeting. “Several people around me were standing up for me. I finally got up and walked away,” Simpson said. She was grateful to the people who confronted Gorman over his conduct, she said.
At a subsequent meeting, some of Simpson’s supporters wanted the county board to censor Gorman over his treatment of Simpson. Clayton Seabourn, a Shasta County resident, told the board that he grew up gay in the county, and experienced “extreme loneliness and despair” that “drove me to try to kill myself five times,” a local news site, The Shasta Scout, reported.
No board members supported censoring Gorman and the matter died.
Gorman, who describes himself on social media as a patriot and member of the MAGA movement, did not respond to requests for comment.
Running for office
As she became more involved in education politics, Simpson decided to run for Gateway’s board, taking on incumbent Elias Haynes in fall 2024.
Shasta is a place where some LGBTQ+ people say they don’t feel safe. Simpson said she has friends who’ve been spit on and had things thrown at them from cars.
Shasta’s “got some very, very distinctive manifestations of its politics” and “its own flavor of conservatism, partly because it’s highly influenced by conservative Christian ideology,” said Lisa Pruitt, a UC Davis law professor, who studies rural law and justice.
Bethel Church, with roughly 8,000 members, dominates local politics. It “believes in the ever-increasing government of God,” according to its website, and promotes conversion therapy “to leave LGTBQ.” Church leaders didn’t respond to multiple interview requests.
“There are a lot of people who are very against us,” said Cord Padgett, board president of NorCal OUTreach Project, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization in Redding. Simpson leads a transgender group for the organization.
WATCH: Bobbie Simpson explains how she got involved with education policy.
Some people “think we’re brainwashing the kids and performing trans surgeries in the bathroom at school,” Padgett said. Others want LGBTQ+ people “to stay in the closet. You can’t be loud and proud. You can’t hold your partner’s hand.”
In 1999, two gay activists were murdered in their Redding-area home by two white-supremacist brothers who later confessed to killing the men over their sexuality.
Could Simpson win?
There was no known record of an openly trans person successfully running for a seat on a California school board at that time. Several openly gay and lesbian people have been elected to school boards and educational offices around the state.
Sonoma County Superintendent of Schools Aime Carter, is one of them. A lesbian, Carter first won election in 2022.
“It’s very much an uphill battle to run for public office as an LGBTQ+ person,” Carter told EdSource. She said she stuck to campaigning “as an education professional. I refuse to let one aspect of my life define me.”
But even in Sonoma County in the northern Bay Area, Carter said she encountered bigotry. “I was called a man,” she said. “Prejudice definitely surfaced.”
A wrinkle in Simpson’s Gateway race was that her opponent Elias Haynes’ wife was also on the board. Simpson knew that some voters found that too much power rested with the couple. An effort to recall both Haynes over their perceived power was pulled by supporters before it had enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Haynes had the backing of Moms For Liberty, and campaigned on a parents’ rights platform, supporting policies requiring school officials to inform parents if a student identifies as a gender at school that did not match their gender assigned at birth.
Simpson said she was uncertain what would happen as the election neared. She sent handwritten postcards to voters telling them she would focus on the needs of students.
“I want to bring back the focus to education and how we can do best for our children,” she told voters on social media. “Our children deserve to feel respected and safe.”
Bobbie Simpson, far right, during a Gateway Unified School District meeting in MayCredit: Timbre Beck / EdSource
She also pledged to preserve the district’s social emotional learning methodology that aims to foster social and emotional skills within the school curriculum, and programs to help neurodiverse students.
Neither Haynes nor his wife, Lindsi, who’s still on the school board, returned messages.
Gorman weighed in on the race, sharing a photo of Simpson with the caption, “Does this represent your voice on Gateway.”
There’s a bit of a libertarian bent to Shasta, Simpson said, and she hoped some voters might see her identity as a nonissue. She said Elias Haynes “didn’t campaign very much.” Moms for Liberty members were “nice to me to my face,” she said, but she was trolled online.
That didn’t matter. Simpson won with 57% of the vote, beating Haynes in each of Gateway’s three voting precincts.
“I was in shock,” she said.
That an openly transgender person could be elected in Shasta “is just so intriguing,” said Pruitt, the UC Davis law professor. “You would think Moms for Liberty would carry the day, and Bethel is a force in greater Redding.”Bruce Ross, the county Republican committee secretary, offered a local perspective on Simpson’s victory — “The voters of the district who cared enough to pay attention wanted less of the drama.”
“Sometimes the transgender woman is your sober, boring pick in an election,” he said.
Higher office?
As her Gateway term approaches its midway point, Simpson is looking forward.
In January, she joined the board of ACLU of Northern California as part of the organization’s effort to bring in people with a range “of professional and lived experiences, as well as geographic diversity,” board President Nancy Stuart said in a statement.
Simpson said she is thinking of running for higher office, with a focus on fighting for LGBTQ+ issues, a community that “faces violence or threats of violence every day, and we are having our civil rights taken away,” she told EdSource.
Regardless of what her future holds, Simpson said she has learned that even in difficult times, she wants to show people they don’t have to hide who they are.
“I enjoy being visible,” she said.
EdSource Data Journalist Daniel J. Willis contributed to this story.
Related Reading
Supreme Court order puts California schools in legal limbo over transgender student privacy
March 4, 2026California challenges Trump administration’s threat to withhold $5 billion over gender identity disclosure
February 12, 2026PodcastHow one bilingual educator’s childhood trauma fuels his fight for inclusion
December 18, 2025
Follow the Vanguard on Social Media – X, Instagram and Facebook. Subscribe the Vanguard News letters. To make a tax-deductible donation, please visit davisvanguard.org/donate or give directly through ActBlue. Your support will ensure that the vital work of the Vanguard continues.
