(Photo by Ted Eytan, from Flickr)
When the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute convenes its flagship Candidate and Campaign Training in Los Angeles next month, the agenda will be familiar: four days of workshops, mock campaign plans, and late-night study sessions as aspiring politicians learn the ins and outs of running for office.
For the first time, however, this year transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming candidates will stay in town after the larger group disperses for a two-day extension designed specifically for them.
A collaboration between Victory and Advocates for Trans Equality, the program comes at a pivotal time of ascendant transphobia at the White House, in the Trump-Vance administration more broadly, and across the country as state legislatures have advanced anti-trans bills at a breakneck pace in 2025.
Organizers say the training is meant to build a pipeline — not just of candidates, but of resilient leaders who are prepared for campaigns fought in an era of anti-LGBTQ politics, and polarization fueled or accelerated by online platforms.
A physician steps in
Among those voices is Alexis Hoffkling, a family physician in Colorado who decided last year that her lane of impact needed to expand.
“I’ve cared about politics my whole life, in a not particularly involved kind of way that, in retrospect, is sort of like sitting in the stadium of a sporting event and not being on the field,” she told the Washington Blade during an interview last week.
“For a really long time, I’ve been operating in the mode that the best way to make a positive change in the world is to pick something and do it really well. And for me, that was providing medical care and teaching the next generation of doctors to be good doctors without losing their humanity.”
That work, she added, comes with a political education of its own. “You can’t provide safety net primary care with an open mind and an open heart without being a little radicalized by it.”
What pushed her to run, she said, was not any single policy change but a deeper recognition of the stakes.
“It became really clear that this is not a business-as-usual kind of moment in history,” Hoffkling said. “I just woke up one morning and said, ‘OK, I have to be able to say, in 20 years, if I haven’t been disappeared, that I did everything I could when history called for it.’ And I’m convinced that this is the way to do that. Never mind work-life balance.”
Hoffkling brings the daily realities of her patients with her into the political arena.
“Every day is full of stories,” she said. “My patients are wonderful and resilient and thoughtful people whose life stories really clearly demonstrate the consequences of policy decisions.”
The most immediate threat, she argued, is the federal government’s push to cut Medicaid.
“People are going to die. Many, many people are going to die,” she said. “And many more people are going to have their lives devastated by the costs of care, directly and indirectly. Communities are going to suffer. Rural hospitals are going to close, and they’re not going to reopen after they close.”
She worries, too, about the erosion of scientific authority and the exodus of biomedical research talent abroad. “Conceivably, we could restore Medicaid funding. We could even do something more than restore it. But it’s going to take a lot of work to rebuild trust in public institutions when they are being used in a corrupt, anti-scientific and persecutory fashion.”
On gender-affirming care, she is unequivocal: “This is healthcare. This is medical care. In the same way that the government shouldn’t be determining whether or not you take antibiotics or have surgery for your appendicitis, it should be a conversation between you and your doctors,” she said. “Government should stay out of it, and where the federal government is trying to muck around in it, then it is our job as states that care about human rights to do everything we can to protect the sanctity of the doctor-patient decision making space.”
Trainings will be led by trans lawmaker with a proven record
When Virginia State Sen. Danica Roem unseated a 26-year Republican incumbent in Virginia in 2017, she became the first out transgender state legislator in the country. Since then, she has turned her experience into a roadmap for others — including through her book “Burn the Page” and now through the trans and gender diverse training extension she will help lead in Los Angeles.
“What is life like as a trans person on the campaign trail? What is your day to day?” Roem said of the sessions she plans to run. “Because you know that your gender will be the headline of the story. No matter whether you’re running for soil and water conservation district or you’re running for Congress, your gender is going to be the first thing that’s going to be mentioned about you.”
The key, she tells trainees, is not to deny the reality but to control how much it defines the narrative.
“You never say, ‘I’m trans, but.’ I say, ‘I’m trans, and.’ I’m not apologizing for who I am,” Roem said. “I’m trans, and I care a lot about fixing Route 28. About universal free school breakfast and lunch. About making Virginia a more inclusive commonwealth.”
That approach, she noted, has already helped other trans candidates win. “Emma Curtis followed my playbook pretty much verbatim, and now she’s a member of the Lexington City Council,” Roem said.
Trainings prepare candidates for campaigns
For Hoffkling, the appeal of the training is partly practical — fundraising, budgeting, social media — and partly about the blind spots she may not yet know she has.
“The unknown unknowns, those are your blind spots,” she said. “Those are the danger points, and it’s worth spending time and energy to try to map those out so that they’re no longer blind spots.”
But just as important is the chance to learn from others who have been targeted because of their gender identity.
“Most of the challenges of campaigning are universal to any candidate, but some of them will be specific to the experience of navigating a campaign in a transphobic world while trans,” she said. “I want to learn more from the experience and insights of other folks who walk this path.”
Roem, who has trained dozens of candidates through Victory and Emerge Virginia, which works to elect women to public office, said those moments of connection are often the most powerful.
“The most important thing that I did in the Chicago training last year was spend one-on-one time with dozens of them,” she said. “Because then if I can connect with someone as a person, I can usually fish out something beyond the slogan of why you’re running for office. The slogan is nice, the policy position is important. [But] why are you really running? Tell me who you really are.”
Those conversations, she said, often bring candidates to tears. But they also bring breakthroughs that can prepare candidates to “really become unstoppable on the campaign trail.”
Hoffkling frames representation itself as a form of medicine.
“When I have a patient who has a trans kid who comes to her appointments, who is so excited to come to her mom’s doctor’s appointments because there’s a trans doctor — that’s one little snapshot of a moment in an exam room that’s private,” she said. “But that same phenomenon happens at scale, and in a public role in public office, it helps people to see the expanse of possibilities for their future.”
She credits trailblazers like Roem, U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), and Colorado State Rep. Brianna Titone with clearing the way. “If there weren’t the wave of Sarah McBride, Brianna Titone, Danica Roem, Zooey Zephyr…then in my race, I would be facing a lot of questions about, ‘is it possible? Is it winnable, as a trans person?’ And the fact that other people have proved that it’s possible makes it more possible for me.”
Roem sees that ripple effect too. In her own district, polling after her 2021 reelection campaign found that 12 percent of voters reported a more favorable view of transgender people because of her service.
“By a 12-to-one margin, we were actually having a positive effect on how people thought about my own community, which is pretty good,” she said.
The trainings, both women emphasized, are about more than political survival. They are about equipping candidates to become the leaders they wished they’d had — inclusive, effective, and grounded in the lives of their constituents.
“Because we know what it’s like to be singled out and stigmatized by the very people who are elected to serve us in the first place,” Roem said, “which makes us far less likely to do it to our constituents when we’re elected.”
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