Zero.
Out of the nearly 7,400 state legislators across the United States, today in America, exactly zero identify as transgender. Despite historic progress toward greater visibility and inclusion of transgender people throughout public life, our representation in positions of political power lag woefully behind. Today, there are roughly one and a half million transgender Americans, including thousands of transgender youth across Virginia -- and yet they see no one like them in any state legislature anywhere in the country.
Next Tuesday, that could change. Danica Roem could make history. If elected to represent the 13th House District in Northern Virginia, she will become the first openly transgender person to be elected to and serve in a state legislature in our nation’s history.
Roem, a former journalist and native of Prince William County, has run a campaign based on smart policy ideas and real issues affecting her district, from expanding economic opportunity to addressing the congestion on Route 28. She’s spent nearly every day for the last several months knocking on doors and meeting voters, all the while facing disgusting attacks on her identity from the 25-year incumbent she faces on the ballot.
Roem’s opponent, Bob Marshall, has ditched facts and substance to run a campaign based almost entirely on hate and fear, attempting to use Danica’s very existence as a trans person as a weapon against her.
As the Washington Post’s editorial board wrote, “In an era of rising extremism, Mr. Marshall remains a standard-bearer of zealotry whose aversion to pragmatism promotes legislative dysfunction.”
He is hell-bent on limiting access to reproductive health care. Every year, he’s the prime sponsor of a bill similar to the disastrous anti-transgender HB2 in North Carolina. Even after Congress repealed the discriminatory Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law, he tried to ban gay people from serving in the Virginia National Guard. In 2006, he was the author of the “Marshall-Newman” anti-same-sex marriage amendment and continues, years after the Supreme Court’s decision, to oppose marriage equality. His preoccupation with both limiting access to birth control and legislating anti-LGBTQ discrimination has earned him the nickname “Sideshow Bob” by Republican and Democratic legislators alike in Virginia.
Despite Marshall’s almost gleeful disrespect of Danica and his obsession with where transgender people go to the restroom, Roem’s campaign, while never shying away from her trans identity, has focused on issues like fixing local infrastructure and building Virginia’s innovative new economy. Those will certainly be her priorities should voters choose to send her to Richmond next year, but what a statement it would make if the first out transgender woman to win and be seated in a state legislature were to get there by defeating one of the most anti-LGBTQ politicians in the nation.
Marshall’s discriminatory policies and disgusting attacks on Roem’s identity are not an isolated tactic, but rather part of a larger strategy employed by politicians like Donald Trump and his acolytes. They seek to stoke fears and spread misinformation about marginalized Americans. Our politics have gone from coarse to dangerous; these proposals and messages foment bullying, discrimination, and, in some cases, violence. Marshall isn’t alone in this strategy in Virginia: Republican nominee for Governor, Ed Gillespie, has built his campaign on anti-immigrant lies and rhetoric.
That’s why this Tuesday’s election is so important to Virginia and to the nation. The results will speak to whether this is a government of, by, and for some of us or all of us; whether every Virginian is truly seen and respected.
Last November, Virginia voters rejected Donald Trump. Now, one year later, those same voters have the chance to make a national statement by rejecting the politics of hate once again by electing people like Danica Roem and Ralph Northam.
Should that happen, for the first time ever, a twelve-year-old transgender girl from Manassas or Norfolk will be able to walk into that beautiful capitol designed by Jefferson and know that they are not alone, that someone in that legislature understands them.
For that transgender youth, Danica’s election wouldn’t just be a headline or history. It would be hope.
Sarah McBride is the National Press Secretary at the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ civil rights organization. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality.