Editor's note: The author of this piece is a member of Portland DSA, the main organization supporting Paige Kreisman's campaign.

A stint in the armed services will alter anyone’s outlook on the world. During her time in the U.S. Army, however, Paige Kreisman underwent more drastic change than most. Those three momentous years from 2014 to 2017 saw her transition away from the gender she was assigned at birth, lose her faith in the military and in capitalism, and finally, find herself detained and discharged for passively resisting orders — only to wind up as an underdog candidate for the Oregon House of Representatives. As a veteran, a trans woman, and a socialist, she told Teen Vogue she holds no illusions about the injustices of interpersonal bigotry or structural oppression; she’s seen more than her fair share of both.

Kreisman is running for a seat in District 42 of the Oregon House of Representatives, an overwhelmingly progressive district that includes a significant swath of Portland east of the Willamette River. Her campaign is mounting the first-ever primary challenge to incumbent Democratic Representative Rob Nosse, who has held the seat since 2014. In the past, Nosse has been endorsed by and worked with labor unions, progressive organizations, and environmental groups, and he’s considered by some to be one of the most liberal lawmakers in the state. Yet he’s also accepted funding from an array of corporate forces, including Comcast, AT&T, Nike, Amazon, pharmaceutical companies, and the fossil fuel industry. Those corporate ties have made him vulnerable to Kreisman’s critiques from the left.

Kreisman’s election would represent part of a groundswell of radical change, reflecting the increasingly anti-capitalist character of the young American left. She would be the first trans representative in the Oregon House, and her policy platform prioritizes taking meaningful steps towards an Oregon Green New Deal, tenant protections and affordable housing, and campaign finance reform. These initiatives are in keeping with a general leftist push for widely popular platforms that have been criticized by many centrist Democrats as “unrealistic.”

“There [are] material barriers that prevent working-class people from participating in our democracy,” Kreisman told Teen Vogue when we sat down with her at Tea Chai Té, a cafe on Portland’s Eastside. “Which is why it’s not really a democracy at all here in Oregon. So we’re gonna change that.”

Originally from a small town in North Carolina, Kreisman says she joined the military to escape bigotry and a stifling lack of prospects. During her service, she not only became the woman that she always was, but she also experienced a sea change in her personal politics after witnessing what she described as the injustice inherent in U.S. imperialism. In Doha, Qatar, she guarded a U.S. base near where foreign laborers were constructing the World Cup stadium; often robbed of their passports and forced into debt peonage, these workers are in some cases effectively slaves.

“My job wasn’t to guard the workers directly,” Kreisman told Teen Vogue, “but if they wanted to rise up and fight back against their oppressors, I would have been the violence that ended that, that put that down.” She concluded that the U.S. forces in the region were at least in part devoted to protecting what some have estimated as $10 billion in American corporate investment opportunities in the World Cup. The connections between capitalism, imperialism, and oppression had, for Kreisman, become all too clear.

And then Trump was elected. On the same day he sent a tweet announcing that he intended to ban trans servicepeople, Kreisman says she was subjected to sexual harassment and death threats from her fellow soldiers. “The increasing escalation of harassment and violence and policies of treating me and other trans service members as second-class soldiers drove me to the point where I had to do some introspection and realize, what am I even sitting around waiting for?” she recalled. “Am I even going to make it to the end of my contract, or am I just going to get raped and murdered any day now?”