Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), the first openly transgender member of Congress, says the Democratic Party must create space for disagreement on trans rights and welcome “imperfect allies” to the conversation to facilitate meaningful and lasting change.
Since taking office in January, President Trump, who made policies and rhetoric targeting trans people a focus of his reelection campaign, has aggressively targeted transgender rights through policies and executive orders that more than half the nation has said they support.
A February poll from the Pew Research Center found that, across the political spectrum, Americans have grown more supportive of policies restricting trans rights, with support for laws requiring transgender athletes to compete on athletic teams that match their birth sex and making it illegal for health care providers to administer gender-affirming medical care to minors up roughly 10 percentage points from 2022. Two-thirds of respondents to a recent Gallup poll said trans people shouldn’t be allowed to change their sex on government-issued identity documents, one of Trump’s policy priorities relating to trans Americans.
“Candidly, I think we lost the art of persuasion. We lost the art of changemaking over the last couple of years,” McBride said of Democrats in a wide-ranging interview published Tuesday with The New York Times’s Ezra Klein.
“We’re not in this position because of trans people — there was a very clear, well-coordinated, well-funded effort to demonize trans people, to stake out positions on fertile ground for anti-trans politics and to have those be the battlegrounds rather than some of the areas where there’s more public support,” McBride told Klein on his podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.” “We’re not in this position because of the movement or the community, but clearly, what we’ve been doing over the last several years has not been working to stave it off or continue the progress that we were making eight, nine, ten years ago.”
Democrats, she said, must extend more “grace” to those who may disagree with them on some specific policies but who hold the same overarching belief that transgender people deserve respect and safety and the ability to live as their authentic selves.
“We created this all-on or all-off mentality that you had to be perfect on trans rights across the board, using the right language. And unless you do that, you’re a bigot; you’re an enemy,” she said. “And when you create a binary all-on or all-off option for people, you’re gonna have a lot of imperfect allies who are going to inevitably choose the all-off option.”
Klein questioned McBride on the Democratic Party’s response to comments made by Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) on transgender athletes as the dust settled on Democrats’ crushing 2024 election losses, which saw Republicans retake control of the presidency and the House and Senate.
Moulton, who had previously backed legislation protecting trans athletes’ right to compete on teams that match their gender identity and voted against a bill that would have prohibited them from doing so, told The New York Times in November that Democrats “spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face.”
“I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” he said.
“It wasn’t the language that I would use,” McBride said Tuesday, responding to Moulton’s remarks. “But I think it came from a larger belief that the Democratic Party needed to start to have an open conversation about our illiberalism, that we needed to recognize that we were talking to ourselves.”
“I think the sports conversation is a good one,” she added, “because I think there’s a big difference between banning trans young people from extracurricular programs consistent with their gender identity and recognizing that there’s room for nuance in this conversation.”
Other elected Democrats, including Reps. Tom Suozzi (N.Y)., Sen. Ruben Gallego (Ariz.) and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, have openly expressed some opposition to allowing transgender girls to compete against cisgender girls in sports. In January, Reps. Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar, both of Texas, voted with Republicans to advance legislation that sought to ban trans student-athletes nationwide from competing on girls’ and women’s sports teams.
“I think the best thing for trans people in this moment is for all of us to wake up to the fact that we have to grapple with the world as it is, that we have to grapple with where public opinion is right now and that we need all of the allies that we can get,” McBride said, noting that Moulton, whose comments received considerable backlash, ultimately voted against the bill that Gonzalez and Cuellar supported.
“If we are going to defend some of the basic fundamental rights of trans people, we are going to need those individuals in our coalition,” she said.
McBride pointed to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, which yielded legislation to end segregation, Black voter suppression and discriminatory housing and employment practices, albeit not all at once.
“That movement was disciplined, it was strategic, it picked its battles, it picked its fights and it compromised to move the ball forward,” McBride said. “Right now, that compromise would be deemed unprincipled, weak, and throwing everyone under the bus, and that is so counterproductive, it is so harmful and it completely betrays the lessons of every single social movement and civil rights movement in our country’s history.”
“You can’t foster social change if you don’t have a conversation — you can’t change people if you exclude them,” McBride said Tuesday. “And I will just say, you can’t have absolutism, on the left or the right, without authoritarianism. The fact that we have real disagreements, the fact that we have difficult conversations, the fact that we have painful conversations, is not a bug of democracy; it’s a feature of democracy, and that is hard and difficult. But how can we expect that the process of overcoming marginalization is going to be fair?”
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