Molly Cook took her ideas to the Texas legislature and won

Less than 100 votes. It was the slimmest of the slim margins that clenched Molly Cook’s Texas Senate seat in the last election to fill the former role of senator-turned-Houston Mayor John Whitmire. As small as that margin may seem, it’s a great way to sum up Cook’s attitude…always rooting for the underdog, never settling for less, and fully aware that it was the community she serves that offered her the new open position.

The politician ran a campaign that showed why she cares so much about the Houston community: She is a divorced woman who speaks openly about her thoughts and experiences with abortion. She is also open about the fact that she is bisexual.

“I chose to run a really authentic campaign,” she said. “I had also run in 2022, so I had a sense of our constituency… a sense of who I was as a candidate and a sense of what it means to be authentic. I chose to share my abortion story; I chose to be out and proud; and to me, that’s just who I am anyway. I’m just not a super private person. I’m pretty outgoing and pretty proud of who I am and I’m not ashamed.”

Her comfort in her own skin likely stems from her upbringing, when she acknowledged that she didn’t entirely agree with the popular view that being part of the LGBTQ community was a negative thing.

“I was obsessed with Will and Grace when I was a kid, and I watched it a lot. I just remember sitting alone in front of the TV in the living room, all the lights are off, and I just didn’t understand why it was a bad thing to be gay,” she said. “I ended up at a private Christian school for a few years, and I kind of argued with some of the leaders at the school about how there really wasn’t anything specific in Scripture that made sense to me that said being gay was a bad thing or that it was like punishable by going to hell or anything really extreme.

As Cook struggled with her own membership in what she saw as a “culture of hate” and was unable to accept that a person who loves another person could be wrong, she found respite in an unlikely place that would ultimately influence her career: the school nurse’s office.

“I was in seventh grade. I hated school, so I spent all my time in the nurse’s office, because the nurse was my pastor’s wife, so I had known her since I was four years old and I loved her very much,” Cook said. “I would go there as much as I could, eat crackers and drink Sprite and walk out of class. One time when I was there, I was laying on the bed, and I remember she had to intervene because a kid had cut his head open on the playground, and she came back to the clinic with a trash bag of clothes and blood.”

As Cook describes it, it was the coolest thing she had ever witnessed. From there, his fate is sealed. From class captain to budding nurse, plans were put into action.

“This love of healing and caring, this love of people, the desire to keep a cool head in an emergency, to be trained and respond to emergencies, it was planned at the age of 12 and it never went away,” she said.

She then moved into health care, starting with a bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in public health at Johns Hopkins University, before embarking on a career as an emergency room nurse.

“Working in the emergency room for about three years before I went back to school (for my master’s degree) was very radicalizing. You see a lot of suffering, you see a lot of poverty. You see how resilient people are to illness and crisis when they have resources or a safety net,” she said. “But the reality is that we’ve built environments where it’s impossible to choose to be healthy. As a nurse, I couldn’t take someone to dialysis. I couldn’t clean up a bug infestation or make their air less toxic, but as a legislator, I’ll have the opportunity to address those root causes.”

It’s this kind of thinking that has eased her transition from nursing to community organizing and now as a Texas senator.

“For me, it was a very natural step. It’s an extension of my nursing practice, and instead of having one patient at a time at the bedside, it’s 950,000 patients at a time, or 28 million patients at a time. Nursing is exactly what will drive my public service,” Cook said.

Ultimately, Cook is simply looking to use his experience as a way to help the community.

“I just want to be of service, and I always have. I didn’t want to run for a personal project or to check a box,” she said. “I just want to be of service, and I feel like I can be very useful in an extremely difficult room as a nurse, as an openly LGBTQ+ member, as a divorced woman, and I think those perspectives will be very important additions and perspectives to the conversation in this extremely difficult room.”

To learn more about Molly Cook, visit senate.texas.gov/member.