Danica Roem was just recently elected to be the new state legislator of Virginia, which makes her the first openly transgender state legislator. She was elected over Robert G. Marshall, which is impressive because Marshall had been the state legislator of Virginia for the past 26 years. The win was especially satisfying because Marshall is notorious for being anti-LGBT. He was against gay marriage and he tried to get a bill passed that would force transgender people to go to the gendered bathroom that matches what is on their birth certificate.

Marshall would not even grant Roem the smallest amount of possible respect by calling her by her desired pronouns. He instead chose to continue to call her by male pronouns, and even put out an ad stating “Danica Roem, born male, has made a campaign issue out of transitioning to female.” Despite Marshall’s attempts to wear down Roem by being openly transphobic, she still led the race by nearly nine percentage points. She also raised more money than Marshall, with about $500,000 being donated by LGBT advocates and her other supporters across the United States.

When discussing her campaign, Roem said

“A message of inclusion and equality resonated here, and for a national audience. I think it's really important that discrimination is a disqualifier and you can champion inclusion, you can champion equality and equity, and you can win.”

I am glad that she emphasized that being discriminatory should disqualify a person from being able to become an elected official because there is an obvious problem when someone like Donald Trump, who is well known for being a bigot, is still able to become the President. It should be made clear to everyone that by running to be an elected official, you are supposed to be representing all of your constituents, not using your position as a way to target minorities. The public should be able to trust that their representatives will listen to their grievances and address the issue, which was one of the reasons Roem was elected.

The most frequently brought up issue in the Roem’s district was of the traffic congestion on Route 28. Many residents would complain about having to wait in hours of traffic, and that they had decided to vote for Roem because she promised to fix the traffic problems on Route 28. Marshall had been criticized by the public for not giving any attention to the problems facing his district and that he only wanted to make progress with his conservative ideals.

Roem is committed to helping her community as much as she can, but she is also aware of how she has now become a role model. She said that her win was for:

“every person who’s ever been singled out, who’s ever been stigmatized, who’s ever been the misfit, who’s ever been the kid in the corner, who’s ever needed someone to stand up for them when they didn’t have a voice of their own."

Hopefully, her win will inspire more transgender people to pursue a career in politics. A person’s dreams can be crushed because of the lack of representation for them in the field that they are interested in, but Roem can now be a source of inspiration for the transgender community. She still had to face opposition from her opponent and from some of her constituents, but she was determined and rose above it all.