Inside Danica Roem's Historic Campaign as a Transgender Woman in Trump's America
We’re both still sweating, wiping our foreheads and noses and chins after a blistering heated yoga class, but Danica Roem doesn’t want to shower just yet. Arms crossed, she leans against the wall outside the women’s locker room at a yoga studio in northern Virginia, waiting until it’s empty before she heads in to strip off her drenched black top and gray and white workout pants. “I take long showers,” she tells me. “I always was the last person to take a shower.”
But there’s also this: “In the off-chance that I've been clocked, that someone knows I'm trans, if that person has internal bias about it, I never want anyone to feel uncomfortable around me,” she says. The 32-year-old yoga lover and former local news reporter, who’s running for a seat in the state legislature to represent Prince William County, in northern Virginia, understands how hostile people can be. “I don't feel that my mere presence in the locker room should make anyone feel uncomfortable. Because I'm not out to do anything. But in this political climate ... some people can be extremely negative toward trans folk. I'm personally very, very fortunate. I've never had a problem in the restroom ever. I don't think that trans people should have to do that. This is a cognizant choice that I have made, so that one, I know I'm gonna take the longest shower, so I just let everyone else shower first. That's just out of courtesy. And then, second, is self-preservation.”
If Roem wins in November, she’ll be the first openly transgender person elected and seated to a state legislature, and one of just a small number of out transgender elected officials in the world. Under a president who has made curtailing transgender rights a through-line of his administration — from casually tweeting a ban on transgender service in the military to rescinding guidance for school districts about how to treat trans kids equally under Title IX — it would be a tremendous victory. To complete the cosmic poetry, she’s running against Bob Marshall, one of the most anti-gay legislators in Virginia, a 25-year Republican incumbent who authored the state’s (rejected) iteration of the “bathroom bill,” which aimed to regulate which bathrooms transgender people could use.
Roem is tall, 5’11, and thin, with long brown hair she flips and twirls constantly. The first day I meet her, at her campaign headquarters in Manassas, her face and arms sparkle when they catch the light ("My eye shadow exploded in my purse,” she explains, “so I've got glitter everywhere”). She immediately starts talking — about how she’ll make life better in her district, her purposeful yoga practice, her thrash melodic death metal band, Cab Ride Home — and, save for small stretches of time, doesn’t stop. She’s charming and refreshingly unfiltered, but she’s also blunt: When I don’t immediately speak after she finishes talking, she chastises me: “This is your chance for a follow-up!”
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a12217328/danica-roem-interview-transgender-candidate-virginia/
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