* Was born as a boy named Richard in 1957
* Officially declared himself a female in 2011
* Served on the board of Equality Pennsylvania, a statewide homosexual and transgender advocacy group
* Was appointed as Pennsylvania’s Physician General in 2015
* Was appointed as Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health in 2018
* More than 12,000 elderly COVID victims in Pennsylvania nursing homes died under Levine’s watch in 2020.
* Removed his own 95-year-old mother from a nursing home at that time
* Presided over a slow and inefficient rollout and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in late 2020
* Was nominated in 2021 by President Biden to serve as the Assistant Secretary for Health at HHS
* Has advocated for allowing minors to receive hormone blockers and genital-mutilation surgeries
Rachel Levine was born into a Jewish household as a boy named Richard Leland Levine on October 28, 1957, in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Levine attended a conservative Hebrew shul and was bar mitzvahed at the age of 13, but would later
join the much more liberal Reform Judaism movement.
After attending the boys-only Belmont Hill School in Belmont, Massachusetts, Levine earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College in the late 1970s and an MD (with a specialty in pediatric medicine) from the Tulane University School of Medicine in 1983. He also spent time as a resident at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York from 1988 to 1993.
During his fourth year at Tulane, Levine (while still identifying as a male)
met and married a fellow student named Martha Peaslee, who later went on to become an associate professor of pediatrics, psychiatry and humanities at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Pennsylvania. The couple had two children
before getting divorced in 2013.
Levine reports that he himself was still a young boy when he first began noticing that he felt as if he was actually female. In the mid-1990s Levine began what he has described as a 15-year process to fully transition from male to female. In 2011, he publicly announced himself as a transgender woman.