Theresa Sparks is an American transgender woman, and is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and was a candidate for San Francisco Supervisor for District 6 in the November 2010 election. She is a former president of the San Francisco Police Commission and former CEO of Good Vibrations. She is also one of San Francisco's most famous transgender women and was a Grand Marshal in the 2008 San Francisco Pride Parade. Sparks is also a member of the Emeritus Board of the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club, a Navy veteran and a trained engineer. She is a member of the board of directors of the Horizons Foundation, a community-based LGBT philanthropic organization. Early life Theresa Sparks was born on April 8, 1949, in Kansas City, Kansas, where she grew up. Assigned male at birth, Sparks expressed her gender identity at an early age by wearing women's clothing, though she later resisted these impulses in adolescence. Sparks went to Kansas State University and graduated with a degree in engineering. She served in the United States Navy. Later she managed several waste management and recycling companies and patented two recycling techniques. She married her first wife in 1971 and together they had three children: two sons and a daughter. After nine years of marriage, Sparks finally revealed to her wife her desire to live as a woman. They separated shortly after and eventually divorced. Sparks remarried, but that marriage also ended in divorce. Sparks underwent "intense therapy and an electric shock treatment" to try to suppress her femininity, before deciding at last to embrace her gender identity. "It's an unusual condition, but it's not unnatural," she said later. "You discover that the only way to live with it is to transition physically so your physical appearance matches how you feel about yourself." Transitioning By 1997, Sparks moved to San Francisco, where she felt she could more easily adjust to life as a woman. But even there, in a city known as one of the most transgender-friendly in the country, Sparks faced challenges as a transgender woman. Despite 20 years of experience in waste management and managing three environmental consulting companies as a man, Sparks struggled to find an occupation in San Francisco as a woman. She applied unsuccessfully for more than 100 jobs. Sparks eventually acquired sporadic work as a cab driver, bank teller, and census taker