Meet Josie
Josie is a small town girl.
A Latina, she and her sister were raised by a single mother and her grandparents. To make ends meet, her mother pulled double duty as a Head Start teacher and public bus driver. After her mother remarried, Josie gained her true father, a police sergeant, and her parents raised her and her sister to believe in work ethic and a tireless drive to push forward. Seeing her mother and father not just work hard, but work for their community, endowed Josie with a love of her country.
This sense of patriotism led Josie to join the U.S. Navy. She became certified as a nuclear power operator, deploying four times to hostile waters aboard the USS Ronald Reagan. After their service, they pursued their career in public service, which opened the doors to their life as an activist and political strategist. They have proudly served the Democratic Party as a presidential national delegate, as a founding member of the DNC Trans Advisory Committee, and were recently appointed to serve on the Commissioner of the Maryland Commission of LGBTQIA+ Affairs.
As a trans woman, Josie began living as their authentic self in 2020, embracing the truth of their identity. The reason for this is that Josie still believes America is a place where we must all be equal under the law, where living your truth is as American as apple pie, and where we can achieve if we set ourselves to big, bold goals that lift Americans out of poverty.
Now, Josie is running for Montgomery County Council at-large because this isn’t the time to step back, but the time to step forward, step up, and fight for what we believe in. This means fighting to build more housing, provide assistance to cut costs, and relief for renters, this means working to protect the local community from job losses caused by reckless federal spending cuts, this means working with public school teachers as our partners and allies in educating the future generations, this means embracing immigrant communities not demonizing them, and doing our part to fight the climate crisis by building green.
Josie lives in Silver Spring with their partner Katie and dog Annie.
Josie in the news
Silver Spring resident Josie Caballero, an LGBTQ+ policy advocate and Navy veteran, says she is running for an at-large seat on the Montgomery County Council in the 2026 general election because it’s time to stand up and fight for the county in the face of changes wrought by the Trump administration.
Director of Special Projects at the National Center for Transgender Equality Josie Caballero joins Meet the Press NOW to discuss how companies are addressing pride campaigns and safety concerns.
There have been over 500 anti-trans bills introduced across the United States. Some of these bills are threatening to redefine the business landscape. These bills range from forcing customers to use specific bathrooms to attacks on employee retirement. If these bills were to be enacted, businesses and workplaces would be forced to change how they do business.
When Josie Caballero was 8 years old, growing up in Mineral Wells, Texas, she assumed every little boy secretly wished to be a girl. Caballero had been born the oldest male in a conservative Latino family. “In Latin culture, the first-born male child is kind of the person that leads the family,” she says. “So to turn all that around, and become the woman I’ve always been, was very hard on me.”
Born and raised in small-town Texas, growing up, I seemed like a pretty happy kid. I got A’s in school, played soccer, sang in the chorus, was in student government, and even started the chess club at my high school.