Virginia woman makes history as openly transgender delegate
RICHMOND, Va. — A Virginia woman who is set to become the first openly transgender person to get elected and serve in a state legislature in the U.S. brushed off her historic win over one of the state’s most conservative lawmakers, saying she is focused on fixing congested roads and making the General Assembly more transparent.
“When we’re talking about it being historic, yeah, it will be historic when a transgender woman finally helps fix Route 28 because that’s what I’m here to do. This is why I ran. I was very, very specific about the issues I was running on,” Democrat Danica Roem told FOX 5 in Washington, rattling off what traffic lights need to be replaced and specific overpasses that need to be built.
Roem, a former reporter and longtime metal band singer, defeated Republican Del. Bob Marshall, winning 54 percent of the 22,000 votes cast in the northern Virginia House of Delegates district outside the nation’s capital.
She will be the only out trans state legislator in the U.S. and the first to both get elected and serve, according to the Victory Fund, a political action committee that works to get openly LGBTQ people elected.
Roem started her gender transition about five years ago when she was 28 and began taking hormone replacement therapy in late 2013. While she openly talks about it, saying it “fundamentally altered my life for the better” — she’s made it clear over months of campaigning that she would rather focus on jobs, schools and improving Route 28, one of the area’s most congested thoroughfares.
She said in an interview with The Associated Press earlier this year that she quit her job as a journalist to focus on campaigning full-time and said it was hard to find time with her band, Cab Ride Home.
Roem said she wants to create a more inclusive commonwealth so that “no matter what you look like, where you come from, how you worship or who you love — you are welcomed and celebrated in Virginia because of who you are, not despite of.”
Her opponent was a lightning rod for controversy, sponsoring a bill that would have restricted which bathrooms transgender people could use. Marshall often drew the ire of even his own party. He authored a now-void constitutional amendment that defined marriage as between one man and one woman, and sponsored a bill banning gay people from openly serving in the Virginia National Guard.
On the campaign trail, Marshall and other Republicans repeatedly misidentified Roem’s gender.