Instead, she’s spent the last few weeks at the center of a British right-wing media storm, facing down vile Twitter abuse and being subjected to articles with such headlines as “Lily Madigan Is Not a Woman”.

In another time and place, Lily Madigan would be hailed as a role model and a trailblazer—a 19-year-old teenager thought to be the first transgender woman elected as a women’s officer in the Labour Party.

In November, Ruzylo stepped down from her position, claiming that a member of Bexhill and Battle CLP had organized a smear campaign against her. It prompted the rest of the executive council to resign en masse with her, and Madigan was named in the resulting press coverage as one of three people who had filed formal complaints against Ruzylo.

Madigan filed a complaint with the secretary of Ruzylo’s constituency Labour Party (CLP), Bexhill and Battle. For those less-versed in local politics, CLPs are groups of local activists who organize around constituency lines and are able to select Labour parliamentary candidates and campaign on their behalf.

In September, Madigan learned that a Labour women’s officer named Anne Ruzylo had been allegedly posting transphobic messages on her Twitter account. In July, Ruzylo tweeted about a young child who had recently come out as trans: “Kerching… here’s the next Jazz [Jennings]! Nice money maker for the parents. Child abuse!” Ruzylo did not respond to a request for comment.

At a time of widespread concern over youth disengagement , Madigan stands out for her age and commitment to local politics. So how did she become the target of such vicious and abusive online bullying ?

“It got pretty bad,” she says when we meet in London. “Lots of people inciting violence and stuff like that. My friends were like, ‘If you don’t block them, you’re not allowed to go on Twitter.’ So it was an easy choice.”

“I always like to run for stuff,” she says, a small smile on her face. “It makes me happy when I get it.” She loves her area: “Rochester is historic, it has its pretty castles and cathedrals. Rochester High Street reminds me of Diagon Alley because all the buildings are leaning in weird ways that make it look like it’s going to fall down.”

Madigan was already active as a Labour activist; she had campaigned against Conservative plans to shutter the local nursery and Sure Start Centers and represented her area at the Young Labour Conference , the national gathering of Labour youth activists, where she met Jeremy Corbyn and shadow youth minister Cat Smith. Madigan was also a well-liked student politician at the University of the Creative Arts, where she studies fashion design—she had been elected Women’s Officer, LGBTQ+ Officer, and Campus Executive Officer for her campus.

But Ruzylo’s alleged behavior got Madigan thinking. Her local CLP of Rochester & Strood was heading for its annual general meeting in November, and it would be voting in a new executive committee. Why not put herself forward as women's officer?

She maintains that she was doing the right thing by lodging a complaint against Ruzylo. “Labour is supposed to be the party of equality, so I definitely think views like hers shouldn’t be in our party.” (Ruzylo has since quit the Labour Party.)

“My complaint wasn’t even acknowledged,” Madigan says. “They seem to think we all have meetings and exchange ideas—I don’t. Like a ‘trans agenda’—I don’t know what that is!”

She came out to friends when she was 16 and then to her family and her school, St Simon Stock Catholic School, a year later. That’s when the problems started with the school administrators: “They wouldn’t call me by my name—and it was my legal name [by deed poll] at that point—they used the wrong pronouns, and they wouldn’t let me use the right changing rooms and toilets.”

Growing up in Rochester, Kent, the soft-spoken but stoic teenager first realized she was trans when she was around 14. “I remember I heard someone talking about it in the library and thinking, Oh, that’s probably me,” she says, with characteristic understatement. “It just kind of made sense.”

The landmark piece of legislation from 2010 made it illegal to discriminate against trans people. Last October, the school apologized to Madigan and allowed her to access the correct bathroom and uniform for the remainder of her education there.

Madigan got on a train to London by herself and started knocking on doors of law firms, reasoning that the school was discriminating against her and that she might have a legal case against them. “In the end, I did find one who did it for free. They brought the case against my school, and my school backed down because of Labour’s Equality Act.”

“I reached the point where I was like, I have to do something otherwise it’s not going to get better ,” she says.

Madigan was already “pretty depressed” due to the lack of support she received from her family, and the treatment she received at school made it worse. Her grades started dropping, and she spent a bit of time in hospital “because it got that bad.”

“Since then,” she explains, “I’ve kind of felt like I owed Labour.” There was no other political party for her, especially once Jeremy Corbyn was voted in as Labour leader. “I feel like he speaks sense and he cares about the young, not any more than he cares about votes.” When she ran for executive officer at her university, her election poster had a picture of her and Corbyn.

On November 17, Madigan stood for the post of women’s officer in front of a church hall full of other Labour activists voting in their new executive committee. It was later described as one of her CLP’s best-attended meetings yet. The previous women’s officer was stepping down to run for another position; Madigan was up against one other contender for the role and delivered a two-minute speech about fighting transphobia in the party and in society.

“I didn’t feel that confident, to be honest,” she acknowledges. “My speech was just good enough to turn people to me.” She won “pretty clearly, but it wasn’t a landslide.”