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= Jenn Burleton = Jenn Burleton (November 20, 1953) is a transgender American musician, educator, public speaker and advocate/activist. In 2006 she co-founded Trans Youth Family Advocates (TYFA), later renamed Trans Youth Family Allies. It was the first organization to specifically advocate on behalf of transgender and gender expansive children, adolescents and their families and focused on gender identity and expression, rather than sexual orientation. In 2007, she co-founded TransActive Education & Advocacy with co-founders Hayley Klug and Kaig Lightner, functioninb as its executive director until January, 2019. In February of 2019, TransActive(renamed the TransActive Gender Project) became a program of the Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling in Portland, Oregon. She was named program director.

As both an amateur and professional musician, Burleton has toured nationally & internationally, working in various capacities with many well known performers and artists.

Early Life
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to parents Eddie Burleton (1914-1984), a professional jazz musician and Shirley (Wallace) Burleton (1919-1991), Burleton has one older brother, Hugh Edwin Burleton, Jr. (born 1940). An actor, he left Milwaukee in 1959 to pursue a theatre career in New York City. For more than ten years he was part of the experimental and revolutionary troupe The Living Theatre, founded by Julian Beck and Judith Malina.

At the time of her birth her parents were living in the same house as her paternal grandmother - occupying the upper "Polish Flat" in a predominantly black neighborhood near 8th and Center street on the North Side of Milwaukee. In addition to working as a professional jazz clarinetist and bandleader, her father Eddie worked temporary jobs to make ends meet. Her mother, Shirley, while primarily a homemaker started an upholstery/seamstress business in partnership with her sister Pat (Jenn's aunt), however it didn't last long.

Burleton's paternal grandmother Emma (Berndt) Burleton (1890-1970) was a strong, self-sufficient individual and her only living grandparent. Jenn's grandfather Louis Franklin Burleton (1889-1952), had died the year before Jenn was born. At the time of his death, Louis and Emma had been married for more than 40 years.

As her parent's marriage was disintegrating in 1956-57, Burleton was removed from the household by the Wisconsin Department of Public Welfare (for reasons unknown) and sent to live with her aunt Pat (Wallace) Eichler and husband, Charles Eichler. They lived in the suburbs of Milwaukee and Jenn was there for a little over two years. It proved to be the most stable family situation of her childhood.

In 1959 Eddie Burleton shot and killed his estranged wife's boyfriend, and intended to kill Jenn's mother as well, but had run out of bullets. A few months later, he was sentenced to life in prison for the crime and was released on parole in 1971 after serving 11 years. During those years, Burleton's mother's alcoholism escalated. Living primarily off the money received from the welfare department, Shirley Burleton supplemented her income through sex work - frequently bringing men home to the tenement apartment where she and Jenn lived.

Gender Identity, Expression and Sexuality
Jenn Burleton identifies as a woman of transgender experience, as well as a member of the gay and queer community through her lesbian sexual identity. As a pre-pubertal child she frequently (and secretly) explored her mother's closet and makeup drawer in order to play with the stereotypical artifacts of girlhood that she knew her female peers were able to enjoy without judgement. She made several attempts to explain her feelings to adults in her life, but always gave up when she grew both frustrated at her inability to communicate with them and ashamed of her own feelings. At Halloween she would find some excuse to dress in costume as a 'real girl'. By the age of 11 Burleton was frequently dressing as a girl and going out to walk around her neighborhood very late at night in order to feel seen and authenticated by other people as her true self.

About this time her sense of being romantically attracted to girls was becoming clear, and this was very confusing for Burleton as she had the heteronormative expectation (common in the 1960's) that girls (as she self-identified) were supposed to be sexually attracted to boys. Still presenting to the world as a boy, she began dating in middle school, eventually marrying at age eighteen in 1972. The marriage fell apart in early 1973, ending in divorce by 1974.

Coming Out & Gender Transition #1
At age six or seven Jenn overheard her brother Hugh and mother talking about his having met Christine Jorgensen at an event in New York City. Jenn later recalled and retold this memory as being not only the moment in which her sense of not being boy was crystalized, but also the realization that she was not alone in world for feeling this way. She had never discussed this with her brother Hugh, however, until he brought it up many years later in November, 2016.

Gender Transition #2
It wasn't until after Burleton's second gender transition in 1979 (she'd previously transitioned in 1974) that she was able to reconcile her sexuality with her gender identity. On February 26, 1983 she and her female partner began a relationship that lasts to this day.