Virginia Democrat Danica Roem was projected to win her election Tuesday, according to Decision Desk HQ, becoming the commonwealth’s first openly transgender state senator and the first out transgender person elected to a state Senate anywhere in the South.
Roem, 39, defeated former Fairfax County police detective Bill Woolf, a conservative Republican endorsed by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin ®, who vowed to bar transgender athletes from competing on school sports teams if elected.
“You attack trans kids in my district at your own political peril,” Roem told The Hill in a recent interview.
You are in this legislature, but we do not grant you the rank of human.
I know this is a separate issue, but that is always how I think the overwhelmingly racist Tennessee state house saw the two Justins in the Nashville Three decision: elected but not even remotely equal. Possibly not even human.
Goddammit, that enrages me like little else. Above and beyond the racism – which is bad enough in itself – if someone is a duly elected representative I don’t give a flying fuck WHAT they are, let them represent. I don’t have to know why their voters like them, or agree with it. We just have to let them do their jobs if they are serious about doing them.
That a human toilet brush like MTG with zero interest in legitimate governance gets to keep her seat while engaged and competent legislators like Zooey Zephyr and Justin Jones and Justin Pearson are summarily evicted for the crime of being there, or speaking, is just wrong – and is going to be our downfall if we don’t fucking stop it.
It is not the legislature’s job – nor the speaker’s job – to deny an entire swathe of voters their constitutional representation just because some fucking un-self-aware snowflake (or group of snowflakes) gets nellie over someone else’s differences. That’s what they’re there for: to represent differences, not just similarities.