About Jenn Burleton

Jenn Burleton is an educator, advocate, and founder of Burleton Education whose work draws on decades of experience in education, communication, advocacy, and complex systems.

For more than 20 years, she has worked alongside transgender and gender-diverse children and youth, families, educators, healthcare professionals, advocates, and institutions—helping people understand gender diversity, navigate difficult questions, and translate knowledge into more effective support and action.

Her work combines lived experience, historical perspective, systems analysis, and practical education. Whether examining healthcare policy, the history of anti-trans movements, the needs of gender-diverse young people, or the ways institutions respond to social change, Jenn’s focus is consistent: make complex information understandable, useful, and actionable.

Jenn’s pronouns are she/they.

Jenn Burleton | Onstage 2005

Jenn Burleton | Technology Session

Jenn’s path to education and advocacy did not begin in a classroom or nonprofit office.

From 1974 to 2010, she worked as a professional musician, songwriter, and arranger, performing and touring with a range of artists and bands. That work demanded collaboration, adaptability, close listening, and the ability to communicate across very different personalities and environments.

She spent more than eight years in the high-tech sector with Software House International (SHI), serving as the company’s Oregon education-sector sales executive from 1997 to 2005. The work required more than understanding technology. It meant learning how large systems function, how institutions make decisions, how people respond to change, and how trust is built across complex relationships.

Those experiences continue to shape Jenn’s educational work today.

The setting has changed—from music and technology to education, history, healthcare, and public understanding—but many of the underlying skills remain the same: careful listening, strategic communication, pattern recognition, systems thinking, and translating complex information into language people can actually use.

Burleton Education is not a departure from Jenn’s earlier work so much as an evolution of it.

Trans Youth Family Allies logo

Jenn Burleton | Lewis & Clark (2023)
photo credit: Mariette Pathy Allen

Jenn’s work with transgender and gender-diverse children, youth, and families began formally in the mid-2000s, during a period when reliable information and affirming support were far harder for many families to find.

In 2006, she co-founded Trans Youth Family Advocates/Allies (TYFA), one of the earliest nonprofit efforts in the United States focused specifically on supporting transgender and gender-diverse children, youth, and their families. The work brought Jenn into direct contact with families, educators, healthcare professionals, advocates, and communities navigating questions that institutions were often poorly prepared to address.

In 2007, she co-founded TransActive, expanding that work through education, family support, professional training, community engagement, and advocacy. Over the following years, Jenn’s work increasingly focused not only on helping individuals navigate systems, but on helping those systems better understand the people they were serving.

In 2019, TransActive became the TransActive Gender Project at Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling, bringing the work into an academic setting and expanding opportunities for professional education, training, and collaboration.

Burleton Education was established in 2024 to carry that experience into a broader educational practice. The work now brings together decades of advocacy, teaching, historical research, systems analysis, and lived experience to create resources that help people understand gender diversity with greater accuracy, context, and confidence.

Across each stage, the underlying purpose has remained remarkably consistent: give people better information, help them ask better questions, and make complicated systems more understandable and responsive to the people whose lives they affect.

2013

The Trans 100

Jenn was named to the inaugural Trans 100, recognizing transgender people whose work was creating meaningful positive change in their communities.

2014

Youth Access to Care

As Executive Director of TransActive, Jenn helped advocate for Oregon Medicaid coverage of medically necessary care for transgender youth, including pubertal suppression treatment. When implemented in 2014, Oregon became the first state to ensure Medicaid coverage for transgender youth.

2021

LGBTQ Nation
“Hometown Hero”

LGBTQ Nation named Jenn its Hometown Hero in recognition of her sustained advocacy and impact on behalf of transgender youth and their families.

2022

Gender Diversity Certificate Program

While serving as founder and program director of the TransActive Gender Project at Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling, Jenn helped create and launch the first-of-its-kind Gender Diversity Certificate Program, serving as its codirector. The program is now known as the Trans Youth Support & Advocacy Certificate.