20 Time May 9/May 16, 2022
lawmakers have introduced a tor-
rent of anti-LGBTQ legislation. Of
the at least 238 measures put forward
in 2022, roughly half specifically tar-
get trans people, according to an NBC
News analysis. Fifteen states have
banned trans students from play-
ing on sports teams consistent with
their gender identity. Four states have
banned trans youth from receiving
gender- affirming health care. This
spring, two states banned classroom
instruction about sexual orientation or
gender identity in certain grade levels.
“I am, to say flabbergasted doesn’t
even begin to do it,” Roem, 37, says
about the surge of anti-LGBTQ legis-
lation. “They’re picking on the most
vulnerable constituents they repre-
sent. They’re picking on children.”Roem’s distRict includes the
site of two major Civil War battles
and a former plantation home.
There are more things named after
Confederate General Stonewall
Jackson in the area, she says, than
there are Starbucks in all of greater
Prince William County. “This is not
the place where the first out and
seated trans state legislator was
supposed to come from,” she says.
The lifelong Manassas resident
concentrates on local policies, in-
formed by her years of covering the
community as a journalist. Her 2017
slogan was “Fix Route 28 now!” As
she often quips: trans people get stuck
in traffic too. In Roem’s first bid for
office, she built an extensive ground
game, knocking on over 75,000 doors.
“I show up,” she says. “You can’t just
put up TV ads and hope that people
like you.”
Roem says that when she started
writing her memoir in 2020, she began
to think that anti-LGBTQ legislation
in Virginia was becoming a thing of
the past. But, she’s learned, “politics
is a pendulum, and right now it has
taken a very nasty turn against these
kids.” This term, Virginia Republicans
introduced bills that would ban trans
athletes from playing on sports teams
consistent with their gender identity
and eliminate the requirement that
schools follow the state department
of education’s model policies forSeTTling down wiTh a chai laTTe in a
coffee shop in Manassas, Va., Danica Roem
acknowledges that some of the rumors about her
are true. She did once do a keg stand on camera
while people yelled, “Suck it!” But she insists
that she never threw that keg out the window, as
an old Facebook post alleged.
The post in question was dug up by Roem’s
opposition research on herself during her 2017
run for the house of delegates to represent
Virginia’s 13th district—a blend of exurbs and
historic battlefields roughly an hour south of
Washington, D.C.—where she ultimately de-
feated the incumbent Republican to become the
first openly trans person elected to and seated
in a U.S. state legislature. She’s using a newly
published memoir, Burn the Page, to reclaim the
power of moments other politicians might hope
to keep buried, detailing stories her opponents
have tried to use against her.
There’s no point in the former vocalist of
the thrash-metal band Cab Ride Home denying
being a metalhead. And yes, she partied in her
20s—at times aggressively as she navigated
gender dysphoria before starting to transition
in 2012. She also spent more than a decade as
a reporter, and sometimes still swears like one.
The aim of her book, Roem says, is to show
readers they can “succeed because of who you
are, not despite it.”
Her own success came in the suburbs, where
half of Americans live and every election tells a
story. At 33, Roem flipped a seat a social conser-
vative had held for 26 years by focusing on local
issues while benefiting from Northern Virginia’s
increasingly left-leaning demographics. She won
re-election in both 2019 and 2021—an election
where Democrats performed poorly overall in
Virginia and lost control of the house of del-
egates. She’ll be on the ballot again come 2023,
she says, but is coy about grander statewide or
national ambitions. She was recently named the
executive director of Emerge Virginia, a non-
profit that recruits and trains Democratic women
to run for office. “Because I clearly didn’t have
enough jobs,” she laughs, applying liquid eye-
liner in the back booth of the coffee shop before
TIME’s photo shoot.
Now is a critical moment for trans rights in
the U.S. In the past two years, conservative state
MetalheadMuckrakerInkLawmakerVirginia state legislator
Danica Roem’s road map
for protecting LGBTQ kids
BY MADELEINE CARLISLE/MANASSAS, VA.