“Picture it,” Roem, now a groundbreaking politician who also was a journalist back then, wrote later about that time: “a five-foot- eleven, long-haired brunette metal-head trans lady reporter wearing a rainbow bandana, an A-line skirt, and a black hoodie … screaming obscenities behind the wheel of her four-door ’92 Dodge Shadow America.”

Not the usual gauzy pitch to voters. But in Tuesday’s election, the onetime scribe and heavy metal singer scored her fourth election victory, breaking through to the state Senate and overcoming a pitched effort from Republicans and their allies to use her transgender identity as a cudgel.