When Lisa Middleton was a 12-year-old living in East Los Angeles, she checked out a book at the library about Christine Jorgensen, a World War II veteran who became the first person to publicly go through sex reassignment surgery. It was after devouring those pages that a wide-eyed Middleton first realized she was transgender.

Fifty years later, Middleton is hoping to make her own history. On Tuesday, she’ll be on the ballot in a City Council race in Palms Springs, and could become the first openly transgender person elected to political office in California.

She’s part of what activists describe as a new wave of transgender candidates running for local, state and federal offices around the U.S. in the wake of President Donald Trump’s election and anti-transgender policies gaining traction in some states.

“We have been the preferred target of conservative forces,” Middleton said in a recent interview. “If transgender people are being attacked, you need transgender voices to respond to those attacks.”

Virginia could elect the first openly transgender state legislator in the U.S. this week in a closely watched race between Danica Roem, a transgender journalist, and Bob Marshall, a conservative incumbent state delegate who refuses to refer to his opponent by female pronouns. Two transgender candidates running for city council in Minneapolis could become the first to represent a major city.

There are at least 29 openly transgender candidates running in the U.S. in 2017 and 2018 elections, according to a list compiled by Harvard researcher Logan Casey.

“Our rights are on the ballot every time someone is elected,” said Sean Meloy, political director of the national group Victory Fund, which supports LGBT candidates running for office.

Not all of California’s potential transgender politicians are Democrats or liberals. Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympian and reality TV star who is probably the most famous transgender person in America, said earlier this year that she might run for U.S. Senate as a Republican.

Already, there’s at least one other openly transgender candidate in California: Terra Snover, who’s running a long-shot independent campaign against Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Turlock. She’s the first openly trans person to run for Congress in California, activists believe.

The first transgender person elected to any public office in California was Victoria Kolakowski, a Superior Court judge in Alameda County. She made history when she became the first transgender judge elected in the nation in 2010.

But Kolakowski said that as a judge, she’s felt constrained from commenting overtly on issues like transgender rights, and she wants to see trans people win more legislative and political offices. “It’s quite frustrating,” Kolakowski said. “My position isn’t a political position, it isn’t a partisan position, and I can’t use it to be a spokesperson for the community in a way some other folks could.”

Middleton, 65, worked as an auditor and manager at the State Compensation Insurance Fund for 36 years, spending more than a decade in the Bay Area. She came out as transgender in 1995, in a nerve-wracking announcement to her co-workers and an even more difficult conversation with her two children. She and her wife Cheryl retired to Palm Springs in 2010, where she’s served on the planning commission and several neighborhood groups.

Now she’s one of six candidates competing for two open seats on the council. She’s second in fundraising and has racked up endorsements from former U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer and the local newspaper, The Desert Sun, among others.

As a council member, Middleton is hoping to focus on issues like homelessness and renewable energy, including passing a requirement that all new residential buildings in the city have solar panels. While she does talk on the campaign trail about being transgender, it’s not something she often focuses on, she said. “Most everyone in this town knows who I am and knows that fact, and there’s usually not the need to bring it up,” she said.

But Middleton is fully aware of the symbolic power of her candidacy. At a recent campaign event, she said, she met a shy 7-year-old girl with pigtails who shook her hand and told her, “I’m like you — I’m transgender.”

“To be an example for kids like her … that is absolutely a humbling opportunity,” Middleton said.

She has it a little easier than many transgender candidates around the country because she’s running in LGBT-friendly Palm Springs, which has more same-sex couples than almost any city in the nation, according to census data. If Middleton is elected, Palm Springs would have gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans people on its council — possibly a national first.

Still, Middleton said, she’s received some anti-trans hate mail and emails. One resident supporting another candidate posted an angry Facebook message referring to her as a man — but later apologized and has since met her for lunch, she said.

Halfway across the state, Snover is running in a crowded primary field against Denham, who is considered one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents in the country. Snover’s campaign isn’t as established as Middleton’s — she had raised just $380 as of the end of September, compared with hundreds of thousands of dollars for some of her Democratic rivals.

Snover, 30, also doesn’t live in the Central Valley district she hopes to represent, residing instead a two-hour drive away in Mountain View. She said she chose to run in Denham’s district because she supports most of the other Bay Area members of Congress. (Members of Congress aren’t required to live in their districts, but almost all successful candidates do.)

“I know I’m a long-shot candidate,” Snover said, “but we need to be getting out there and having our voices be heard.”

A political independent and Bernie Sanders fan who works at a nonprofit that helps people with disabilities, Snover said she hopes to advocate for single-payer health care. During her transition, she faced “horror story after horror story of dealing with insurance companies,” who she said discriminated against her for being transgender and refused to cover even basic treatments. Those experiences convinced her the U.S. should get private companies out of the health insurance market entirely.

Denham voted against a measure that would prohibit taxpayer dollars going to federal contractors who fire or discriminate against LGBT employees in 2016, and also voted against legalizing gay marriage as a state senator in 2005. His office did not respond to a request for comment.

The first trans candidates are, in some ways, following the same path as gay and lesbian elected officials, who started winning lower level local and county positions — like Harvey Milk’s historic tenure as San Francisco supervisor — before being elected to state legislature and Congress.

However, there’s a much broader acceptance of gay and lesbian people than trans people in American society, polling shows. Melissa Michelson, a political science professor at Menlo College who has studied attitudes about transgender rights, said it wasn’t clear yet whether transgender candidates would be able to easily follow in the footsteps of gay and lesbian candidates.

“Many people are not there in terms of acceptance, and it remains to be seen whether they can get there,” Michelson said.

Nevertheless, California’s trans trailblazers say they aren’t waiting around for opinions to change.

“For many years, we laid back and were quiet — it was easy to keep a low profile, and we went under the radar,” Kolakowski said. “But now we’ve got a movement, and we need to speak up.”