Lancome, where she wrote and edited work for two years, she has been heard and seen on npr and podcast including sesh love. It or leave it. Yo, is this racist . This is love. Star trek the pod directive and more. And her writing has been published in Elle Marie Claire town and country Womens Health and others and her book admissions is out now. Danica roem is part of the Historic Group of elected officials flipped republican seats in the 2017 election. Shes the first out and seeded transgender state legislator in american history. Prior to her political prior to her political career, she was a journalist and now serves as a frequent guest on national media. She and her work have been featured in the usa today people. Gq, the new york times, elle and others, and she was the subject of the glad Award Winning documentary, this is how we win. Her book, burn the page is out now. So i thought we would just start like as most many stories do from the beginning in your lives and maybe in each of you can talk about your kind of Early Childhood and what were your most indelible memories and maybe what how you tapped into some of that for in writing the book. Kendra, you want to start . Oh, boy. Sure. Early childhood. So i grew up in maplewood, new jersey, which if youre from brooklyn, you might know it as the place that your friends are escaping to. Its a small town, kind of like 30 minutes outside of the city. I grew up in a single income home. My my mom was a very traditional stay at home mom. She did not have a job until i was, like 25, 26. And that was when my parents got divorced and my dad was a wall street banker. And so basically, i my book admissions is about the three years that i spent at the task school, which is a boarding school in connecticut. And i was raised essentially knowing that i was going to go there because my dad had graduated from the school in 1974. And it was basically i had been going up to the campus since i was two because he was really involved in Alumni Affairs and he was on the school board for a while. And he had a really positive relationship with it. So i have a lot of memories of just like spending time on this, this campus that was essentially a i usually refer to it as a club for teenagers. Its several many hundreds of acres Rolling Green hills, two ice rinks, just like a really kind of like luxurious place to be educated and to and to spend time in. Or that is how it appears on the outside. So i really grew up like knowing that i was going to go there but was not like fully prepared because of the way i had grown up in this like very upper middle class town. And with parents who themselves were pretty privileged, i was not really prepared for kind of the the stark contrasts in terms of like socioeconomic stuff and also the way race would play out on that campus because i grew up pretty sheltered. I grew up with sort of a lot of respectability politics, like ingrained me by both of my parents. And so, yeah, i just i wasnt per prepared for it. So thats kind of a quick background on, on my childhood. All right. So my name is danica roem. I am grateful. Representative for the city of Manassas Park in the western pennsylvania county, portions of haymarket. Gainesville in my lifelong home, manassas, in the 13th district of virginia, house delegates elected 2017 reelected, 2019 2021, running for state senate next year. And i, like i said, because its lifelong manassas im born and raised Prince William hospital, september 30th, 1984. Cheryl sadly wrote and long story short with it, is my childhood is a series of overcoming a lot of traumatic events and other things and at the same time having, you know, the best italian food on sunday nights of my moms cooking. And if you know anything about italian family argument is communication and i like to make that point pretty clear in my book as well and. You know, the thing is, in my case, my upbringing in any way, even though the way that you would stand is like, hey, look, you live out in the woods and in the burbs, right . You know, like this, you know, this, you know, in a white middle class family. But you know whats going to stand out so much . Its like, well, you know, my dad killed himself when i was three years old. So in my earliest childhood memories is running next door after you got himself on fire. Then i. My grandmother died by the time i was seven over and she had parkinsons and we had lived with her right after he had died. So to immediate family. So i lived with you die by the time i was in second grade and know so the the core nexus is my family, my mother, my sister and me for yall from here, my mothers the bronx specifically from morris park and again, Italian Catholic woman who was born with a chip on his shoulder. So that definitely ingrained in the funny thing is like so im virginia to my core. I mean, you know, my Manassas Battlefield fleece that i wear fleece better than my governor, by the way, just for the record. Yeah, but, but one of my students, they go into the city, my mothers voice starts coming out so, so aggressively, like she that this otherwise just sort of completely boring midatlantic accent every other day second shes on the phone with some from new york. Oh, my god, donna, how you doing . Oh, my god. Did she just hear enricos close over in the bronx. Cant even believe it. Were going to get a good pastry now, right . That. So thats part of my upbringing only in the south and i spent 13 years in Catholic School. I spent four years Public School over at loch lomond groceries, and then from fourth grade all the way until i graduated in parliamentary university in 2006 and college, those last four were by choice. Those middle nine absolutely were not. And the thing about being a closet case in a Catholic School is its already pretty suffocating environment that just makes it worse. And i was looking for outlets and i was scared to death of anyone finding out who i was and at the same time, when you will have that fear, you want, be associated with other things, and so you start overcompensating in some ways, right . And at the same time wanted people to think i was the middle person i was, you know, whatever other identity i was the funny person. I never wanted to be perceived as the gay guy, which is how i was basically referred to for most of my childhood with a series slurs. Thats for the perception of being gay, let alone the actual reality of being trans. And as i would find out in my upbringing, when i was just basically trying to figure out how to talk to the world at large, i would use sexuality as a stepping stone to get to a gender identity, which i wrote about a lot in from the page about how i would come out as bi first. Im so sorry to everybody person, by the way, because they always are like, are you actually or not . Its used by two gay to two trans and you know keeping my social rotation. Gender identity are different things, but it was just an easier way for me to start like tiptoeing, just talking to people. For the first time. I told anyone i was 17 years old and once it got into college and i was 343 miles away from home, thats when i first start telling the women in my life. And really, because wanted them to feel safe around me, i want them to know it was going to be okay to talk to me just like they would do any of the other girlfriends and then, you know, like we would get dressed up and go club and go dancing or go into like, you know, gothic shows and stuff like a band called jen tortures. Ill see you after the show. And you go to these shows where its just like, it doesnt matter your gender, they are everyones wearing makeup anyway and all black. So hey you know fit in and that was kind of my tiptoeing out. I had some pretty bad events that happened in between that i wrote about in the book, but eventually i always described general for is kind of like having a hand. It closes around your throat slowly over time, to the point where you cant breathe anymore and you got to do something about it. That moment happened for me when i was eight. I knew, right, tom . I was ten years old, that i was trans, but i never even thought it. So at 28, i finally started seeing a psychologist. I came out to my mom, my sister, my 30th birthday, and just to put a wrap around this one, mama said that night, well, im just concerned. How are you going to actually find someone . And i said, well, i got a date next week actually at this with a temptation concert in baltimore with this trans guy whos from finland, originally lives in maryland now. And so that was october 7th, 2014, when we had our first date. And then september 9th, 2022, we went back to baltimore to go see apocalyptic art because finished tell metal girls and of that person who my mom was concerned about, whether i would ever find out just proposed to me so yeah hey. We have breaking news on the panel to that. Thats very good. Excellent. So chen, julie wong has now has joined us and i want to we just opened up. I just asked i introduced everybody bio and then just wanted a little bit more kind of talk about their earliest childhood memories. I know you have many, many, many of them in your book, but in sort of what were the most some of the indelible ones and that you wanted to sort of just, you know, clue people into is where you came from literally and figuratively. Absolutely. I apologize for being late. I used to live five minute walk from here, but today i had the fortune of commuting from new jersey. So, yeah, i mean, my my story when you said, danika, the fear of being found out, being terrified of that that although we have very different experience is i relate to that so deeply that hits at the very core of me so i went from being a pretty privileged, spoiled kid, north china, to getting on a plane, getting off that plane at jfk airport and realizing that i was half a world away from everybody i ever knew. It was just me and my two parents and we were what was called undocumented. And i never been aware of documents before. I never knew that that was an issue anywhere in the world. And all of a sudden because of that change we did not have enough money for food. We shared a home with six, seven other immigrant families. Every time i saw a cop, a firefighter, a sanitation worker, anybody in uniform, i would turn and run the other way. And so this this fear of being found out became the defining sense of me. And with secrets come this implicit shame of you should hide who you are. Theres something inherently wrong with you. And like danica, i chose to overcompensate by achieving. I thought that i could weave an American Dream where i would earn my worth in america and prove that i was thoroughly american, that i was i belonged here and i deserved all the documents that i had so longed for. And was not. Until you achieve your your dreams that you realize that there were some fallacies in there. Im sure well talk about that a little. Can joe just want to ask you so you mentioned to the first black legacy student at taft school, and you start there in three. Is that so . Did you feel a responsibility to your family and or other students of color to excel not in terms of like that like being the first because i when i got there like being the first so i was the first black american legacy, i should say. There was another person the School Started accepting black students in like 1953, and the first black student who attended was actually from bermuda. And so then he sent his granddaughter there in the eighties. So she was actually the first black legacy to graduate. And then i was the first black american one. And i make that distinction because taft was actually the first place where i really learned that there was sort of that distinction within the diaspora of black american versus like black from anywhere else, like literally anywhere in the world. I remember i had a friend who was on haitian or haitianamerican, and someone referred her her as africanamerican. At one point she was like, i am absolutely not. Which comes like with that statement also like comes some things that you have to unpack, but it is an important distinction to make because the experiences are really different. But in terms of pressure to excel, i didnt really know that i was the first black american legacy to who had the potential to graduate until it was announced during an all school like an all school assembly. Um, about black history at taft. And that was like kind of when i realized like, oh, okay, this like a thing. And there were also a bunch of other kids there who were freshmen when i was a senior who were also legacy students at the time. And we were all friends just because all the black kids at the school friends. So in terms of excelling like i did feel pressured to do well outside of that that fact just because like i knew that i was there i was at the school. A lot of my friends from maplewood where i had gone to Public School through the ninth grade, i had a lot of friends who would leave between like eighth and ninth grade and they would go to other schools like they would go to my care. Montclair kimberly or like kent place, other schools in new jersey. And the idea of having to then like go away to that Privileged School and then come back like that was sort of like an embarrassing thing that might happen. So like that where a lot of the pressure came from, it was like, you dont want to you dont want to come back. You dont want to have that associated with you. And it again came up for me when i was applying for college as well. It was of the main reasons i did not want to to rutgers. Rutgers grad school. It one of my favorite actors, avery brooks, is on faculty there. Its a great place, but i like was really like conscious of the fact that i did not like to go to college with the people that i had like quote unquote, escape kept going to Public School because a lot of my friends from columbia, my Public School winter records because it was cheap and it was a good school and. So yeah there was that pressure of like wanting to do better than what you had left behind and and one of the jean of the story tell, a story about a roommate that you had there who who made racist comment to you. But basically, he she said that she didnt like that you had to get up early to your hair and complained about the, quote. Gross, unquote, smell in the room from your hair products. And then you sort of devised was sort of a prank that meant to be not vengeful. But in and where you were going to put a hex on her and set up the witchcraft symbols in the room. Yes, i was very revenge motivated and how did that experience affect how you would see your other white classmates after that . Was it did it change that in many ways, yeah. There was like so like i said, the this maybe i didnt take it, but the school was it was very segregated socially white students pretty much like you only hung out with white students. Black students hung out with black latin students. And then everyone just kind of assumed like we had a black table in the in the dining hall. But then there was also like an asian table and by asian table, like it was just assumed that everyone was chinese essentially when in reality was like there were kids from hong kong, there were kids from china, japan, korea. I had a lot of very good korean friends. Like it was just like it was a whole mixture, but the school was just so segregated. And when i got there i was not i wasnt aware of that. And back in maplewood, like one of the big things thats always touted by the realtor is its like its so diverse. You, like everyone is friends with everyone. And for me that was really true. My group was very, very diverse. And so i got attached and i really thought i was going to do the same thing and that was not the case for me. And so, yeah, it was my, my friends, two of my black friends were the ones who told me when my roommate said that me they were the ones who said like, thats racism. Because for me, racism was very much like a water hose. Its a slur its like a very big event incident that happens because we didnt have language like microaggression back then to describe those sort of smaller incidents are so yeah it really after that it really did change sort of my perception of like who i am going to be friends with in this environment. And i really did start like that was the moment i stopped really trying to be friends, the white kids at that point. And there were a few who would like come into the group because we were very we would take in misfits like that because we were at the school essentially misfits. But it was it was very much it was not an effort that i was making on my part on outreach, because it very much felt like it wasnt possible. No. Danica, i wanted to ask you so you mentioned that you dont know that danica was in a you call it thrash metal or we just call a heavy metal, what we call oppression, melodic death metal. Okay. Okay, good some people in the room respect the differences. So, you know the big question is, do you go from being as you write about youre a thrash metal boat vocalist working also as a food Delivery Driver. At one point, right to. A legislator who beat a 13 term incumbent. I think its really funny that of the parts of my like career biography, we went over it, we just talked about metal band for 12 years. We talked about food Delivery Driver and my 92 dodge and. We completely missed the ten years i was a newspaper reporter. Well, no, well get that. But the reason i beat that, though, is that was my chief qualification for office. The 2500 news stories i heard about covering western Prince William county, my home area, and i was working for for a two full time jobs for four or five years. At one point where i was working for the hotline in dc covering campaigns at six something in the morning until mid afternoon, and then i would hightail it out to haymarket and go cover, you know, maybe a battlefield girls volleyball game or maybe i would go all the way down to gerry, virginia, to go cover an electric chair execution in person. Theres a fun little way to spend your evening. I saw that. And you know, for all of the things that i you know, that i did, all the different identities that i acquired kind of along the way, its kind of in the personal loyalty type where you see its like its not that you cant focus on. One thing is that theres a lot really cool things you want to do and you kind of want to try a whole lot of different stuff, which also means y