Transitioning gave Rachel Maes confidence to extend herself, become part of the community

Rachel Maes would like what she considers to be the least interesting thing about her to be the thing the rest of the world would mostly ignore entirely.

Maes is an Assistant City Attorney for the city of Green Bay. 

She has double majors in political science and Russian and, while she says she’s pretty rusty, she could probably fend for herself if you dropped her in the middle of St. Petersburg.

“Assuming I didn’t get arrested, I could do fine in restaurants and get a hotel and make my way around,” she says with a laugh.

She’s a mother of three.

She made the Dean’s List twice in law school.

She graduated in the top 10 percent of her class at UW-Madison.

And less than two weeks ago she won a seat on the Brown County Board. 

And that’s where the least interesting thing about her becomes kind of interesting. When she won that election by a mere 66 votes, Rachel Maes became the first trans person to earn a seat on the county board.

While it is all those other things that help define Maes as a human being, her trans status matters in the current environment, when the Trump administration and the Christian right have launched attacks against the community, when states such as Kansas and Texas have mandated trans persons revert to their birth or “dead” names in order to function legally in society, be it voting or obtaining passports or driver’s licenses.

“I mean, a demographic that you belong to is being treated like crap, that's infuriating,” she says. “There's no due process. There's no opportunity to go to the DMV and get a replacement (license). And then there are some of the bills that are being passed in other states and other jurisdictions. I'm going on a Disney cruise with my family in less than a month, and when I'm in the airport and when I'm at the port, those are government-owned buildings, and I can't use the bathroom in those buildings without risking a $10,000 fine or six months in jail.

“So there is a sense of injustice, and I don't just weather that flippantly. But the pendulum swings both ways, and I'm still optimistic that things will normalize.” 

Maes is just the sixth trans person to hold public office in the state of Wisconsin. 

‘We can talk it through’

Maes is bright, articulate and confident, and it’s clear she cares deeply about her community, raining praise on the entire Fox Valley for its amenities for families as well as for those who, for any number or reasons, struggle in society. She makes note of Green Bay’s many specialty courts – OWI, veterans, teen, mental health – which provide critical resources. 

“I think we've got seven specialty courts right now, and they provide more one-on-one interaction between a defendant and the prosecutor or the judge and case managers and social workers,” she says. “And I think that those specialty courts really are the best opportunity that we have currently at achieving the interests of justice and giving people who are going through what may be the most challenging time of their life a realistic opportunity to redeem themselves and rehabilitate themselves and to get back on their feet.”

Maes grew up in Green Bay before moving to Minneapolis with her then-wife, where she eventually got her law degree from Hamline University. The plan was to get back to Green Bay to raise a family – she has a 13-, 11-, and seven-year-old now – but she instead ended up working at the DA's office in Superior. Eight years ago, when her oldest child reached school age, they moved to Green Bay where she became assistant city attorney. It’s a job she loves because she gets an opportunity not just to keep the community safe but to work with people who have screwed up their lives in some small way, but who can find redemption under the right guidance. Guidance Maes strives to provide.

“It's a heavy caseload, but it's a lot of fun,” she says. “And I get to chat with a lot of good people who maybe made a bad decision or made a mistake, and it’s not their proudest moment, but we can talk through it. And there's an education component to my role because I know that I'm doing something to help keep the community safer for my kids and my neighbors, and at the same time, I can talk to them about how they could handle this better the next time they're in that situation.”

A non-partisan campaign

Maes ran for Circuit Court Judge in 2021 against a 19-year incumbent. Maes’s limited name recognition was made worse by the fact that she had legally changed her name 18 months earlier when she began her transition. She lost the race but learned from the experience, then lost her first county board election the following year in a campaign fraught with external strife. Her brother died a month before the election and she had emergency gall bladder surgery two weeks later.

This year, she won a February primary with 53% of the vote, then won the general election in April despite taking no money from either political party while her opponent took several thousand dollars from the Republican Party. She was committed, she says, to keeping the race non-partisan because she thinks county governance is non-partisan.

“Local government isn't about partisan politics,” she says. “It's not about abortion. It's not about gender-affirming care. It's not about these culture war issues. It's about neighbors helping neighbors, and who's fixing the roads and the highways and who's operating the library system and are you funding county parks and Adult Protective Services, Child Protective Services. Is the court system running efficiently? Do we have enough staff for court reporters and stenographers? It's the bread-and-butter things that affect our daily lives.”

Which doesn’t mean politics doesn’t enter into her new job. She recognizes budget prioritization is politics. Affordable housing and homelessness were among the issues she ran on and to find solutions to those issues requires making decisions that venture into politics and partisanship. And with county boards figuring to have to fill budgetary gaps from the Republican Party’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” that cut much of the social safety net, political choices will most certainly have to be made.

“Does the sheriff's department need an armored vehicle, or could the Aging Disability Resource Center (ARDC) benefit from having another vehicle for Meals on Wheels?“ she says. “I also want to see the creation of a specialty court that addresses the intersection of homelessness and the justice system.

“There is some prioritization, but I think for the most part, Republicans and Democrats and independents want their highways to be plowed when we get two feet of snow.”

One of the top issues among all the county board campaigns concerned transparency. The Board currently does not livestream its meetings, something Maes strongly believes it should be doing, arguing that people need to know who’s showing up to represent them and how they are contributing to the discussion.

‘I made the decision to live’

In 2019, Maes was faced with an existential decision, whether or not to go on living by fully accepting and embracing who she was and transitioning to becoming a woman.

“I mean, I graduated from high school with a 3.85 GPA and 29 college credits,” she says. “I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, top 10 percent of my graduating class. I made the Dean's list twice in law school. I had a successful career. I had a wife and three kids. I had a gorgeous house. I mean, anyone looking from the outside would see this is someone living the American dream.

“But I didn't like myself, and my self-esteem and self-confidence was very low because I saw my body developing in a way that terrified me.  So in March of 2019 I made the decision to live and to live as fully as I can.”

In her three campaigns for office, dark money ads attacked the fact that she was a trans woman, claiming she used taxpayer money to pay for her transition based on the fact that she worked for the government. In fact, she was taking advantage of the same rights anyone with employer health insurance enjoys, she says, arguing that she pays her premiums, co-pays and deductibles and is entitled to the health care that is legally available through her coverage. 

Maes’s transition, she says, probably saved her life. In any case it has completely changed it.

“For the brief blip in history that I get to exist on this spinning space rock, I'm not going to apologize for doing that in a way that I can be happy, that I can be self-confident, and that I can be comfortable in my own skin,” she says. “But it has become a culture war issue, and I don't know that there's any more marginalized community right now than black, transgender women. I'm white, so I have some privilege there.”

Maes says that had she not transitioned, that even had she chosen to go on living, she’d never be where she is today, she never would have had the confidence to extend herself the way she has in the community, where she currently sits on the boards of directors for six different non-profits. With the level of confidence and strength and comfort she has achieved, she says she feels like she can be the armor for trans people who are weighed down by the attacks from society and from the Trump administration and Christian right.

Living authentically

While she doesn’t lead with the fact that she’s a trans woman, she’s certainly not running from it either. 

“I think it speaks to the power of living authentically,” she says. “Having been through that process, I know what it feels like to be miserable and to have people call you names and to have radio show hosts spend an entire segment explaining how your gender expression disqualifies you from a position that you are absolutely qualified for. So to the extent that I can be visible, I'm going to do that. All of my social media accounts have no public screening or privacy protections. My life is an open book. People can see what I'm up to. They can see that my life is pretty boring. I'm a mom of three kids, and I wear a lot of identities that I think are more interesting than the fact that I'm transgender.

“But the fact of the matter is, people attack me because I'm transgender. And to the extent that I can pull that negative attention away from someone who is contemplating self-harm or is in a vulnerable position, I want that attention focused squarely on me, because I can take it.”

Maes actually thinks that having both masculine and feminine perspectives gives her an advantage in her approach to the world. Ultimately, though, what matters, she says, is how she conducts her life as a human being. And her hope is that society begins to see her in that light as well. 

“I think as people see me doing the work in the community, as they see me volunteering for NeighborWorks Green Bay or the YWCA, or my local neighborhood association, helping take care of our neighbors, they realize I'm not this other demographic,” she says. “I'm one of them, and I think that the more that people get a chance to interact with transgender individuals, whether it's a family member, a co-worker or a friend who comes out, they will realize that we're not these scary, predatory boogeymen.

“We want a good job. We want to live comfortably. We want to be happy. You know, we want to love and be loved, and be part of the community.”

Transitioning gave Rachel Maes confidence to extend herself, become part of the community © 2026 by Kelly Fenton is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0