Dear John,
It’s now been a year since the Dobbs decision and the landscape across the South is, in a word, bleak. Virginia is now the last state in the entire region where you can access safe, legal abortion care when you need it – and that’s only because of the elections we’ve won since 2017, which allowed us to pass bills that changed the laws of Virginia and block regressive bills too.
Six years ago, the national headlines from my campaign could more or less be summed up as “transgender candidate defeats self-described ‘chief homophobe’ of Virginia.” Sure, that was all true – but the thing about my predecessor that a national audience may not know is he was the most staunchly anti-abortion legislator in Virginia and perhaps the country throughout his 26 years in office. He fundamentally wanted the law to reflect his personhood viewpoint of life beginning at conception – and he never got his way because Roe v. Wade was law.
As a transgender woman, reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy are integral and essential to my transition and to my health care. So, if I don’t want politicians interfering with my reproductive health care decisions, then I don’t want them to interfere with yours either, nor do I want to interfere with my constituents determining what choice is right for them.
I recently spoke to EMILY’s List, which exists to help elect pro-choice, Democratic women, about it at their annual gala in Washington, D.C. where I was a finalist for the Gabrielle Giffords Rising Star Award:
