The residents of a California town are trying to recall a gay mayor who came out as transgender AFTER assuming office — and said mayor isn’t happy about it.
Indeed, to hear Calexico Mayor Raul Ureña tell it, he’s being bullied out of office for being transgender.
But in fairness, he has faced some unnecessary incidents, such as when, during a Pride-flag raising event in 2023, an “anti-trans” protester named Rebecca Lemon lunged at him while screaming, “He’s not a woman!”
“I think she’s a big bully,” Ureña said to the Daily Mail about Lemon. “She barks like a bulldog and is bigger than me, but I’m not afraid.”
“I can absolutely say what she was doing was illegal, was unlawful, was a fault and was something you don’t do to a human being. I can’t be afraid of those kinds of incidents. I have a whole city to govern and it’s a particularly difficult city to govern at home,” he added.
This is the Mayor of Calexico, California, a small border town in Imperial county. Raul Ureña won the Mayor spot as a gay man, then went genderfluid, and is now pretending to be a woman. pic.twitter.com/I4bdmJSybx
— Tess T. Eccles-Brown, PhD (@TTEcclesBrown) April 10, 2024
The problem, critics say, is he kind of asked for this by not being upfront about his intentions. It wasn’t until after he was elected to office as a gay mayor in 2020 that he decided to come out as a dress-wearing transgender woman with, FYI, a hairy chest.
“[Ureña] eventually started wearing dresses and makeup in official appearances, which riled up voters who felt duped because they believed they were voting for a gay cisgender man and not a transgender woman,” the Daily Mail notes.
And the thing is Ureña long knew he was into this lifestyle. He admitted to the Daily Mail that he’d felt felt “so good” when putting on a dress for the first time at the age of 10.
The transgender mayor also admitted that his parents had told him to hide his sexual identity as per security reasons when he came out as gay at the age of 17.
“My parents wanted me to keep it to myself because they were worried about my safety,” he explained. “My dad was not very happy with me being public about my sexual orientation.”
Ureña now argues that his sexual orientation is being used against him to prop up a recall effort against his mayorship.
He’s not too keen on leaving office, partly because he believes he’s less vulnerable as an LGBT individual in office versus one not in office.
“I might even be more vulnerable if I’m not in an elected position where people have elected me to represent a lot of people who don’t identify as LGBT,” he explained.
NEW: California border town’s first transgender mayor faces recall
Raúl Ureña, was first elected in 2020 with 70% of the vote. He came out as gender-fluid and transgender after his reelection in 2022
Ureña says he always have to watch his back and he might even be more… pic.twitter.com/87JtmnadWj
— Unlimited L’s (@unlimited_ls) April 12, 2024
Dovetailing back to Lemon, she’s one of the people leading the recall campaign against Ureña. In fact, she was the one who served Ureña his recall papers, which he then reportedly tore up.
Speaking the Los Angeles Times in a separate interview, Ureña blamed the recall on “tried-and-tested, predictable transphobia.”
The recall activists view things differently.
“[S]ome prominent recall supporters are quick to mention, and to share, photos and posts from Ureña’s personal social media accounts — some that pre-date elected office — in which she is scantily clad or wrote bawdy captions,” the Times notes.
“And the language in the official recall petition strikes a moralistic tone. Ureña, it says, ‘has proven poor leadership with open and public indecency and intoxication shared on social media with absolute reckless disregard for accountability towards families with children,’” according to the Times.
Ureña for his part isn’t sweating the salacious photos.
“I looked sexy as hell,” he told the Times. “Those are some of my best photos and I still won the election.”
California’s first hairy-chested transgender mayor of Calemexico, Raul Urena, 26, has claimed that they’re being “bullied” out of office.
Urena is facing recall after voters complained that they voted for a man into office. Urena was voted into office at the age of 23 and was… pic.twitter.com/2dgfKN5AQ0
— TheeAmerican76 (@TheeAmerican76) April 11, 2024
Here’s the fascinating catch to all this: Calexico, a city of about 38,000 people, is comprised primarily of Democrats, though there has been some uptick in Republicans since 2016.
But for the most part, it appears to be Democrats hating on Ureña. Interesting!
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Vivek Saxena
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://www.bizpacreview.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.