On her Instagram, Mauree Turner boasts about avocado toasts and teas that she blends herself, filled with “cinnamon, lemon, raw honey, eucalyptus, giggles, peppermint, licorice root, laid edges, dandelion root, soft smiles, chamomile.” For her (or their, Turner goes by both pronouns) 27th birthday in January this year, her friends gave her a mini indoor garden with lettuce, carrots, radish, and tomatoes, the vinyl of Paramore’s final album, and Nike fit hijab so that she could step out and run in the winter. Turner, herself, committed to reading more of the Quran.

Mauree Turner is now almost 28, and she’s plastered all over national media, set to become Oklahoma’s first non-binary person to serve in a state legislature in the United States, and Oklahoma’s first Muslim legislator, representing District 88 (via CNN). Turner, who was endorsed by both Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, knocked her competition, Republican Kelly Barlean, out of the water, winning over 70 percent of the vote (via Oklahoma State Election Board). “I want to take time to give you all your rose,” she told her supporters via Instagram on Friday, November 6, “You all who continuously show up and share your stories about how you feel seen and how you feel heard… I don’t want to let you down. It’s remarkable and humbling and it’s also really scary.”

This is what motivated Mauree Turner to run for office

“This campaign, this movement that we built really hinged on visibility,” Mauree Turner told The Washington Post after the election. “The legislature hasn’t always been a friendly or welcoming place to many folks, and this was about drawing space — not fighting for a seat at the table, but creating a new table altogether.” Turner has been thinking about visibility since she was a little kid. “I grew up in small-town Oklahoma, a black queer kid that never came out to their friends until college,” she told her Instagram followers on Friday. “And I never had representation to look up to,” she reflected. Turner did come out to her mom in the second grade, and it was her mother who taught Turner that “my voice was going to be powerful, and I was going to help other people propel their voices, too.”

Now, Turner, who is a new mother (per Instagram, her baby was born in August 2019) and who ran on a platform highlighting justice and public education and healthcare reform, is set to do just that. It’s a far cry from where Turner was when she turned 26 years old. Then, she was doing what you might expect. For her reflective birthday post, Turner wrote on her Instagram in wonder about having traveled through South Korea, India, Sri Lanka, and Quatar, having totaled a car, and having started her career at a non-profit working for criminal justice reform.  

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