Kayley Whalen

Kayley Margarite Whalen is an advocate and communications professional who has devoted her career to building connections across social justice movements. She brings to her work her lived experience as an autistic transgender Latinx woman. For over 11 years, she has led some of the biggest digital campaigns for disability justice, transgender and queer justice, environmental justice, humanist values, and peace-building. She is the Treasurer of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network and also serves on the Board of Directors of Trans United Fund; she formerly served on the board of Secular Student Alliance. Her business, Kayley Whalen Consulting, provides communications and digital marketing strategy to organizations dedicated to advancing social justice.

Kayley has represented the LGBTQ and disability communities as a public speaker at events across the United States and the world, including speaking twice at the Obama White House. In 2016 she co-founded Trans United Fund, the first U.S. transgender-led political campaigning organization, which has now helped elect numerous transgender candidates to office. In 2019, while living in Southeast Asia, she started the blog TransWorldView to provide a forum to share the stories of transgender advocates from across Southeast Asia and the world. In 2020 she represented the United States as Miss USA in Thailand’s Miss International Queen, the world’s most prestigious transgender pageant.

Kayley has provided communications, digital marketing, and fundraising support for non-profits including Greenpeace USA, Sins Invalid, Search for Common Ground, Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network, the National LGBTQ Task Force, Trans United Fund, Values Into Action, Alliance for Citizen Directed Supports, the National Leadership Consortium on Developmental Disabilities, Casa Ruby LGBT Center, Americans for Safe Access, and the American Humanist Association. Her broad background in advocacy and non-profit communications across many different movements gives her a deep understanding of the many components of building successful grassroots campaigns to achieve collective liberation.