During our interview at Fable Cafe in Westwood, Sol Kersey wore a screaming bright pink graphic tee that said, “The moral panic is about me!”
And they’re right – Kersey’s story begins as a transgender kid growing up in the South. Scared, yet motivated, Kersey has been through hell and back to reach the point where they’re at right now: Cincinnati’s first openly transgender candidate for City Council.
Kersey, 32, is already endorsed by LPAC, the only organization on a mission to elect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer women and nonbinary people. One of dozens of candidates for Cincinnati City Council, Kersey stands out, not only for their historic campaign but for their approach to politics that is based on an origin story you have to sit in a coffee shop for nearly three hours to believe.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CityBeat: If you had to tell me your origin story in a nutshell, what would it be?
Sol Kersey: My origin story is kind of wild. I grew up in the Tennessee River Valley, right outside the Great Smoky Mountains, and I grew up under the auspicious eye of the Southern Baptist Convention, which, as a queer transgender person, makes for a very interesting childhood. I went through a conversion therapy process, through the Southern Baptist Convention. It was very difficult, and music was my escape. I was actually a professional musician before I entered the legal field.
I was a professional bassoonist. Double reeds all the way. I started getting paid to play professionally in sixth grade. You know, I hate sounding like an asshole, but I was really good. I got out of East Tennessee because I was so good. I actually wound up going to Interlochen Arts Academy for my senior year of high school. That is a fine arts boarding high school up in [Interlochen], Michigan.
Getting the scholarship to go, getting the community support from East Tennessee to go – there were people who knew me instead of the me I presented to East Tennessee and knew that I needed to get out.
CB: Had you already come out at this point? Kersey: I knew I was some kind of different from second grade, like very clear to me. I tried [to come out] in high school, and that didn’t go over very well. That led to the conversations with the church and all of that and led to me going back in the closet for quite a while.
CB: So after Interlochen, I’m assuming you started undergrad?
Kersey: Yes, I got a full ride to CCM, [University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music], and it was wonderful. I loved it.
CB: Was this your first introduction to Cincinnati?
Kersey: It was. I had a friend who I went to Interlochen with, and she was from Cincinnati, actually, up in West Chester. I had visited the summer before I started at CCM.
CB: How did your parents react to this new step in your life?
Kersey: About nine months into my undergrad, my biological mother was like, ‘You need to come get your shit next time you’re in Tennessee,’ and I beat her to the punch and went down and got my shit. That’s why I say I’ve been on my own since 17. When I went to Interlochen, I was financially on my own. When I started out at CCM, I was financially on my own. I was paying my own car insurance, my own health insurance, my own rent, the food on my table. It was hard fighting with UC to recognize me as an independent student so I could qualify for in-state tuition. It was a nightmare.
CB: But did it work out?
Kersey: About a year and a half into my undergrad, I wound up being diagnosed with a type one Chiari malformation. It is a congenital skull deformity, so my skull didn’t develop out and down enough in utero. And so in your early twenties, when the brain reaches full-size development, it begins to herniate out the opening of the base of the swell. It wasn’t great.
CB: How did you find out your brain was beginning to herniate?
Kersey: Started just passing out. My roommates came home and found me just passed out on our deck, and the next thing I knew, I was in [Good Samaritan Hospital], like, ‘Hey, your brain’s about 8 millimeters outside of your skull.’ And so I had brain surgery at 21.
CB: And you had just started separating your life from your parents – who was your support system at this moment?
Kersey: I went back to Tennessee and was originally going to stay with my grandparents, my biological mother’s parents, who were good people. They tried what they could with the tools they had for their age and their region to bring the family together. Didn’t work. I ended up living on the floor of my biological mother’s bonus room above her garage; I had to drag a mattress up the stairs by myself and put it on the floor so I would have something to sleep on. She didn’t believe that [the brain surgery] was necessary, or that I was being honest about the need for it, until we were in the surgery consultation. It was very hard. It really shaped my understanding of disability and how we care for other people.
CB: After your surgery, did you return to CCM?
Kersey: Once I got my diagnosis, I withdrew from CCM and UC. My surgeon was like, ‘hey, you know, we cut through four inches of muscle on the back of your neck, and I can’t […] with good conscience, say, yeah, go ahead and try to pursue being a professional musician.’ You know, I was playing eight to 16 hours a day, so it was hard. I mourned it. I still do, at times.
CB: With your future as a concert bassoonist snuffed out, where did you decide to go?
Kersey: I wound up transferring to Northern Kentucky University because I knew I wanted to stay in this area. I knew that East Tennessee wasn’t home. I look at it all with gratitude, because coming back to Cincinnati and trying to just stumble forward and figure out what my next step was actually [led me to meet] my husband in my undergrad. I switched [my major] to Organizational Leadership and he introduced me to Gender Studies as a field, and I wound up transitioning my minor from Japanese Language and Culture to Gender Studies. I was like, ‘Holy shit, I have the vocabulary to talk about all the things that I think and feel and have experienced now.’
CB: How was that transformative for you when looking at your life and your experiences in hindsight?
Kersey: It contextualized my life and helped me understand that what I’ve experienced and what I’ve gone through isn’t okay, and it’s not right, and unfortunately, there’s nothing that can make it right, but that is the living part, right? Because we have to figure out how to deal with things we can’t make right. I was looking at my life in hindsight with that newfound knowledge. That’s what drove me to get my master’s in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies.
CB: Where was that?
Kersey: I went to UC. I applied and I had a terrible undergraduate GPA. I actually just called the department head at UC and I was like, ‘Hey, I want to do this. You’re gonna see my application, it’s gonna look weird. Grades are gonna look shitty, but I’m the real deal. Can you give me a chance?’ And they did.
CB: You also went to UC for law school – how did your Women’s Gender and Sexuality master’s program prepare you for law school?
Kersey: I still remember my first semester course, Foundation of Feminist Theory, and there are moments in that class that truly changed and shaped my life. At the time, I knew I wanted to go to law school, and I didn’t want to go in there and not have a honed and sharpened feminist social justice lens, not have the context, you know? Because I remember in my first semester [of law school] taking criminal law and having my professor at the time ask the class, ‘Why do we think manslaughter was invented as a legal offense or a crime?’ And I was like, ‘Well, because men kill their wives and they needed something lesser than murder.’ And he was like, ‘Exactly.’ And there were people in that room that looked like I had slapped them in the mouth. I had the luxury of going to law school as an adult, right? There are a lot of students who […] are going through law school, [who] haven’t really experienced what it means to be an adult in the world.
I went into UC law as a Social Justice Fellow at the Jones Center for Race, Gender and Social Justice, and I took that very seriously. That was probably the most important thing I did in law school was to have the backing and the support of those involved with the Jones Center. And I would also say the National Lawyers Guild chapter at UC Law was also something that kept the wind in my sails. Because when I got there and that first year, I was like, you know, I feel really alone. I feel like I don’t fit here. I need to mask who I am. The more I kept at it, the more I connected with folks who were like me and who wanted to use their [Juris Doctor degrees] as tools for social change.
CB: You then went on to work for Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the founding scholars of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the first to introduce the concept of intersectionality. What did you work on?
Kersey: I was a legal fellow, and I was researching at the time what we were referring to as the 1.0 and 2.0 anti-CRT bills, which has now morphed into what we can see as anti-DEI, anti-equality, anti-Blackness, anti-queerness. I started understanding these things at their genesis, and that has positioned me to be in a place where I can see the historical context of what’s going on right now.
We had a combined event with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and the Williams Institute at UCLA Law. I actually went to New York City for this and was at the LDF headquarters and watching us try to, in real time, document what is going on, strip it back to its bare parts so people can see what’s going on. It really taught me a lot about what it means to educate someone in this climate and about these topics, and it’s really a hallmark of what I consider the core of my approach to being a public servant and working in the nonprofit field.
CB: And you’re in that nonprofit space now with the Equality Ohio Legal Clinic. Walk me through your role there – what do you do?
Kersey: I am our intake coordinator. I am the first point of contact for virtually everybody that comes to Equality Ohio Legal Clinic seeking help. And I love it. It’s not necessarily the easiest job in the world to stare down the barrel of problems that queer people are facing on the daily, but to create and facilitate a soft landing spot for someone in crisis, is one of the greatest joys of my life. We assist Ohio members of the LGBTQ+ community [whose income is within 300% of the federal poverty level.] That’s the requirement for us to deliver direct representation or provide direct legal advice.
We do family law, civil protection orders, name changes and gender marker corrections. We do some record sealing and expungement. We do some private insurance denials. We do some employment discrimination work. So we run a very wide gamut.
CB: Now we’ve reached the point in your life history where you’re running for Cincinnati City Council. Why did you decide to run?
Kersey: I’d always had an inkling in law school that it was something I could do. [Council] was something that I could do productively. Not just for me, but for my community, my neighborhood, my family, my friends.
CB: If elected, what would be your top priorities on Council?
Kersey: I’ve been telling people there are three core tenants that I’m running under with the first one being a large umbrella of the other two, which is social justice and human equity. We must have solutions rooted in equity and not equality, because equity is how we can all succeed and thrive. Equality is saying, well, we had the same starting point, sorry. And I think the difference between those two things is remarkably important.
Under that large umbrella of human equity and access to justice is health care and housing. Those are two of my biggest concerns for the everyday Cincinnatian. Two adults working full time making minimum wage cannot afford a two-bedroom apartment for their family. That’s unacceptable. That’s patently unacceptable.
There is also, I think, [an] opportunity for us to deliver greater respect to our unions. I think labor is remarkably important, and as a proud union member myself, my husband is also a union member, labor makes the world go round. And I think that things like LPA’s and CBA’s – land project agreements and community bargaining agreements – are very important opportunities for Cincinnati, because that will dictate for land project agreements if we’re building something on the West End, top to bottom, everybody is labor and unionized. And when we look at the community bargaining agreements, we’re looking at, how is this work productive? How is this development going to impact the community, not just generally, [but] in a positive way?
CB: Housing is a huge pain point for lots of people in Cincinnati – there’s a supply shortage with high interest rates and aggressive landlords – what do you want to see Council do about bolstering opportunities for first-time homebuyers?
Kersey: I think that a huge thing that Council could do, which is no money off of the city’s nose, is a first-time homebuyer education program. I think for first-time homebuyers – and it’s not people’s fault, I didn’t know what [Private Mortgage Insurance] was before I had a mortgage. […] But teaching people what PMI is, what does that even stand for? Teaching people that the state has first-time homebuyer down payment assistance. That’s something that [my husband] and I missed out completely on and would have changed the way we live our lives today had we had access to it. I see there are low-hanging fruit opportunities there, and I say that knowing that there are a lot of first-time homebuyers experiencing similar things that we did in the experience of buying our home and the experience of missing out on state grants and even federal grants, as long as they may still be around to provide assistance with things like this.
CB: Why should the people of Cincinnati vote for you?
Kersey: They should vote for me because I shouldn’t be running for council; I should be dead. And the only reason I’m not is because I live in Cincinnati. And the only reason I’m not is because the people of Cincinnati saw me for who I was in my entirety and let me be me.
Cincinnati voters will vote on council seats this November.
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This article appears in Mar 19 – Apr 2, 2025.