When Texas Congresswoman Julie Johnson stepped onto the House floor in January as part of the 119th Congress, she already had pragmatic instincts of a seasoned legislator, but now she was making history. Johnson is the first out LGBTQ+ member of Congress ever elected from the South. She is also one of the few first-year lawmakers entering the Washington, D.C. maelstrom with years of bipartisan legislative wins already under her belt.
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Now, one year after her election and only weeks from marking her first anniversary in office, Johnson describes her first year not as a transition into federal lawmaking but as an urgent defensive stand against what she sees as a rising authoritarian threat.
“I’m full of purpose,” Johnson told The Advocate during a recent interview in her Capitol Hill office. “There’s so much work to be done up here. I feel like I’m on the defensive team and that’s the role I’ve been in my whole legislative career.”
Related: Texas is gerrymandering the only LGBTQ+ member of Congress from the South out of her seat
It is a role she knows intimately, one shaped by the legislative battles of Texas, the escalating polarization of national politics, and the sharpening sense that democratic institutions are under siege.
Johnson arrived in Congress with an impressive legislative résumé. In the Texas House, she passed 108 bills across three terms beginning in 2018, focusing on patient protection, insurance reform, and sensible problem-solving. She authored the first bipartisan Medicaid expansion bill in Texas history and was named Texas Monthly’s 2019 “Freshman of the Year,” earning additional recognition from the Texas Medical Association and Texas CASA.
Rep. Julie Johnson speaks outside the U.S. Capitol.Office of Congresswoman Julie Johnson
Her legislative approach stands apart in a political era marked by viral theatrics and escalating rhetoric.
“There are workhorses and showhorses in everything,” she said. “I definitely am on the workhorse side of things.”
In Congress, Johnson now serves as the vice ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee and sits on the House Foreign Affairs and House Administration committees. Her early legislative efforts have centered on bipartisan bills addressing prior authorization abuses in health care, deceptive uses of artificial intelligence in elections, consumer product returns, and financial pathways for families seeking homeownership.
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“I’m very practical. I’m very results-oriented. I’m policy-wonky and really try to do good, solid work,” Johnson said.
But even the most detailed policy work cannot exist separately from a political climate increasingly defined by existential concerns.
A summer gerrymander and a courtroom reversal
Just six months into her term, Johnson became the target of one of Texas’s most consequential partisan maneuvers. In August, Republican lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional map and gerrymandered her out of the 32nd District, the seat she currently represents. The redrawn lines fractured the communities that elected her and pushed her into newly configured terrain in a Republican attempt to weaken Democratic representation the Lone Star State.
Then, in mid-November, the political map shifted once again. On Tuesday, shortly after her interview with The Advocate, a federal three-judge panel blocked Texas from using its new map for the 2026 midterms, ordering the state to revert to its 2021 district lines. The court said “substantial evidence” showed that the new map racially gerrymandered districts. The ruling undercut Republican plans to increase their congressional majority from 25 to 30 seats.
U.S. Rep. Julie Johnson speaking at a press conference at the U.S. Capitol.Office of Congresswoman Julie Johnson
Johnson viewed the untimely mid-decade gerrymander as part of a broader landscape in which democratic norms are being tested. In an effort to blunt the Texas advantage, California Gov. Gavin Newsom spearheaded a ballot initiative that passed handily in early November, allowing state officials to redraw maps to benefit Democrats.
“Being in the majority is everything,” Johnson said. “I’m really happy Democrats got it together and fought back really hard.”
If the 2021 lines stand, Johnson intends to run under her current district. If later appeals result in reinstating the Republican-drawn map, she plans to run in the newly configured 33rd District, which includes significant parts of her existing base.
Johnson’s first year coincided with contentious debates over government funding and attempts to leverage Affordable Care Act subsidies in shutdown negotiations. Her district includes approximately 100,000 ACA participants, people whose health care would be directly affected by congressional stalemates, Johnson noted.
She said constituents were unequivocal.
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“People told me: Stand firm, don’t let ’em take our health care,” she said.
As shutdown politics intensified, public pressure mounted on Democrats to “fight harder.”
She argued that Democrats used every available lever, including refusing to vote for legislation she described as “untenable.”
“Whenever we have the lever to pull, we pull it,” she said. “But sometimes they wanted us to pull levers that we didn’t have.”
Long before serving in elected office, Johnson experienced the instability and fear that defined LGBTQ+ life in the decades before workplace protections and marriage equality. She came out, she said, at a time when job loss, insurance loss, and family separation were real risks.
“You couldn’t be out at work,” she said. “The threat of termination, discrimination in all forms, was very real.”
Her experiences shape her conviction that LGBTQ+ representation is vital, not symbolic. She recalled late nights in the Texas Capitol when conservative colleagues would ask sincere questions about queer life — questions they felt too ashamed or fearful to ask publicly.
Related: Julie Johnson just made history as the first LGBTQ+ person ever elected to Congress from the South
“We have to have people in the smaller rooms who can share the stories of our struggle,” she said. “That’s what leads to understanding and compassion.”
She said similar conversations have taken place in Congress, particularly with freshman Republicans who, once they meet her family, find their assumptions challenged.
“It’s tough to hate up close,” Johnson said.
Outside Washington, Johnson returns to her North Texas ranch, where she cooks, gardens, and drives her John Deere tractor across land once tended by her grandfather. The quiet, she said, is restorative, a reminder of the values she represents.
“I love the peace and the quiet, the big sunrise and the engulfing sunset,” she said.
The past year has seen a cascade of anti-trans messaging from campaign ads to floor speeches. Johnson pointed to the 2024 and 2025 Virginia elections, where she saw “incredibly transphobic” advertisements, as evidence of the tactic’s attempt to gain national traction.
Julie Johnson addressing supporters at a speakin event.Office of Congresswoman Julie Johnson
“It was initially successful,” she said, because many Americans lacked “sympathy, empathy, understanding, compassion” for transgender people.
But she said voters are increasingly recognizing the cost of allowing fear-based rhetoric to shape policy.
“People got sucked into a narrative of transphobia,” she said, “and they realized that didn’t do them any good.”
Johnson recalled one moment from the campaign trail that crystallized how misinformation had warped voters’ priorities. While door-knocking during her last election, she met a young Latine man in his late 20s or early 30s still living with his parents. When she asked whether he planned to vote, he immediately demanded to know her position on “boys in girls’ sports.” The question struck her as revealing.
She said she asked him why, of all the issues affecting his life — the cost of housing, wages, and economic opportunity — he had chosen that one. “Why did you not ask me what I am going to do to give you opportunities to get your own house?” she recalled telling him. “Why did you not ask me what I am going to do to make sure you get a good wage that you can afford to not live in your parents’ house?”
She said that the young man admitted he had never thought about it that way and acknowledged he didn’t know any transgender people and wasn’t aware that the policy he was concerned about did not exist in Texas. “I feel really stupid right now,” Johnson said he told her. She said the moment revealed how effectively political messaging can divert voters’ attention from their own material needs.
“It reminded me that people got pulled into a transphobic narrative that didn’t serve them,” she said, “and they’re beginning to understand that.”
She praised Delaware Congresswoman Sarah McBride, the first out transgender member of Congress, who was sworn in as part of the same class as Johnson, for her poise, productivity, and example.
“She’s handling herself in the most admirable way,” Johnson said.
As Democrats look toward the next election cycle, Johnson said the party must prioritize restoring constitutional balance. She emphasized reasserting Congress’s authority over appropriations and taxation; restoring subpoena power requiring administration officials to testify under oath; and creating legal guardrails to prevent abuses of executive authority by President Donald Trump.
“We need boundaries on the executive to prevent an authoritarian takeover,” she said.
Rep. Julie Johnson with her John Deere tractor.Office of Congresswoman Julie Johnson
Two forces frustrate Johnson most: Republican lawmakers who privately condemn discriminatory policies but refuse to challenge them publicly, and widespread voter disengagement.
“Eight million registered voters didn’t vote in Texas,” she said of the 2024 election. “If 10 percent of them voted, we’d have a very different outcome.”
Yet she remains forward-looking. The milestone of her first year in Congress, she said, reinforces how far the country has come, and how much farther it must go.
“My hope lies in the truth and what’s right,” Johnson said. “That I, a little old lesbian from Dallas, Texas, can come here and be a member of the United States Congress gives me great hope.”
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