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Julie Johnson
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Julie Johnson
U.S. Congresswoman
b. May 2, 1966
“That’s what public service means to me: being responsive, cutting through bureaucracy, and making sure federal agencies work for the people they’re supposed to serve.”
Julie Johnson is an attorney and the U.S. Representative from Texas’s 32nd Congressional District. A Democrat, she is the first openly LGBTQ+ person elected to Congress from a Southern state.
Johnson was born in Kansas City, Kansas. She graduated from high school in Alabama and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1987. She received her Juris Doctor from the University of Houston Law Center in 1991 and came out as a lesbian the same year.
Johnson began her legal career in private practice, specializing in personal injury, family law, and mediation. She advocated for workers and people with disabilities and represented more than 350 students in a lawsuit against a for-profit college.
In 2014, Johnson married Susan Moster, M.D., a gastroenterologist. After the 2016 presidential election, Johnson entered politics. In 2018, she was elected to the Texas House for District 115, making her the first member with a same-sex spouse and Moster the first same-sex spouse invited to the Legislative Ladies Club, an organization for Texas House members' wives.
In the legislature, Johnson passed over 100 bills, including Texas’s first bipartisan Medicaid expansion. She supported efforts to strengthen the state’s energy grid after Winter Storm Uri and helped successfully block many bills targeting LGBTQ+ Texans. In 2021, she led opposition to the state’s proposed voting restrictions and traveled to Washington, D.C., to push for the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to reinforce voter protections on the federal level.
Named Texas Monthly’s 2019 Freshman of the Year, Johnson was honored as a Champion of Medicine by the Texas Medical Association and received the Big Voices for Little Texans Award from Texas CASA.
After three terms in the state House, Johnson ran for Congress. In November 2024, she was elected to represent Texas’s 32nd District. She made history again, this time as the first woman to represent her district and the first openly LGBTQ+ member of Congress from the South. Her policy priorities include affordable health care, consumer protections, reproductive rights, and increasing oversight and accountability of ICE agents. She serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the House Administration Committee, and as vice ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee.
In 2025, at the behest of President Trump, Texas Republicans redrew the Congressional map in hopes of increasing their seats in the 2026 midterms. With her district redrawn, Johnson was unseated in the Democratic primary runoff in what is now the 33rd Congressional District.
