Tomorrow Will Be Different

by Sarah McBride

  But even then, I was increasingly miserable. I’d still put on the smile I’d become known for, but it wasn’t really there. I was lost. My aspirations had been my distraction for so long, but they no longer provided me with the hope that things would get better.

  And so I gave up on them. I gave up on politics. I was so exhausted by my own internal struggle that it was clear I wouldn’t have the strength for it. The tension between my dreams and my identity had always resulted in my dreams winning out.

  But that wasn’t the case anymore. The pain had become too much. But in a twisted way, giving up allowed me to begin to come to terms with my identity.

  Sitting in a biology class one day, I started to GChat one of my best friends, Helen, who was studying abroad in South Africa at the time. I had become close friends with her in high school. We worked on Jack Markell’s campaign together and started Delaware’s high school Young Democrats chapter. A year after she went on to American University, I followed suit. Helen is a social activist to her core, someone our friends describe as a walking bleeding heart.

  Somehow, with her in South Africa, confiding in her felt a little less real, the distance amplified by an impersonal computer screen. I told her, in a series of online conversations, that I was struggling with my gender identity, that I thought I might be transgender, and that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to transition but that I had been thinking about it more and more.

  Helen was nothing but supportive. She affirmed me at every step, and when I made the request that she try calling me by a different name and female pronouns, she obliged. Even in just telling Helen, I began to feel a little better.

  Had she responded in any other way, I might have been scared back into the closet, confirmed in my suspicion that my world would come crashing down. Instead, her love and support made the impossible finally seem possible.

  Maybe my world won’t fall apart.

  * * *

  A month later, while on winter break, Helen and I sat in my parents’ living room. The room was decked out for Christmas, my family’s favorite holiday. My mom has perfected the excessive holiday decorations that fall just on the funky side of tacky. Over hot chocolate, curled up on an oversized chair by our fireplace, I told Helen, “I think it’s only a matter of time before I come out as transgender.”

  Baby step by baby step, I was slowly going from hiding, to confiding, to accepting. I was still frightened. I didn’t know how people would react. I feared I would be giving up the possibility of finding love—the first thing I learned about trans people was that loving us was a joke. But even with that fear, I could start to admit the reality and inevitability of my identity.

  Two days later, on Christmas Eve, I sat next to my parents at a candlelight service in the beautiful stone sanctuary of our longtime Presbyterian church. The choir was singing “O Holy Night,” one of my favorite Christmas hymns. And as I stared at the stained-glass window on the final night of Epiphany, I had my own realization.

  I can’t do this anymore. I cannot continue to miss this beauty. My life is passing me by, and I am done wasting it as someone I am not.

  I took my cell phone out of my pocket and texted Helen. “I’m transgender and I’m going to tell my parents after Christmas.”

  I tossed and turned that night, unable to sleep because I knew I would be shattering my parents’ sense of comfort and security for my future in just a matter of days.

  Christmas morning started like all previous Christmases. I woke up and descended the stairs to see my parents ready for my brother Dan and me to open our presents. My oldest brother, Sean, was up in New York with his husband, Blake, for the holiday.

  As the youngest, I usually got to open a present first, probably a vestige of my days as an impatient little kid in our family of five. This year was no different.

  With my parents watching, I unwrapped what I knew was going to be clothes. I opened the box, and there, just as I had initially asked for, was a button-down shirt and a tie. As if I needed another reminder. As if I wasn’t nervous enough.

  The shirt and tie felt like a symbol of the stark contrast between where I was and where I wanted to be, between how I was perceived and who I knew I was, and between my parents’ hopes for the future—a happy, successful child—and what I knew they would fear with my news: rejection. Rejection by friends, by neighbors, and, most certainly, by jobs.

  I finished opening presents and retreated upstairs to my bedroom. About thirty minutes later, my mom walked in and sat on the edge of my bed. She’s an incredibly empathetic person and could sense something was off.

  “What’s wrong? You’ve seemed down, and you never seem down,” she asked me.

  “It’s nothing. I’m just overwhelmed at school,” I responded.

  I could tell she didn’t believe me, but she didn’t press the subject. She left and went back downstairs to begin preparing the stuffing for our traditional Christmas dinner.

  She just asked you. You have the courage to say it right now. Just do it.

  I walked downstairs and into the small sitting room, where my mom was waiting for the oven to preheat. I sat down on the other end of our large, overstuffed couch and took a very deep breath.

  There was no turning back at this point. I knew that once I told them, they would ask every question and latch onto any glimmer of hope that I was mistaken. I needed to present a completely even-keeled, thoughtful, and determined certainty. I had to be as firm in my resolve to them as I was in my knowledge of who I am.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about my sexual orientation and gender identity,” I began, throwing in “sexual orientation” because I knew she wouldn’t have the slightest idea what gender identity meant, and I wanted her to know that I was about to come out as something. “And I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m transgender.”

  I paused, and she put her hand up to her now-shocked face. Through her fingers and already on the verge of tears, she asked, “So you want to be a girl?”

  I was prepared for them to use inaccurate terminology and phrasing. I didn’t want to be a girl. I was a girl. And I wanted to be seen as me. But now wasn’t the time for those types of clarifications.

  “Yes,” I said as confidently as I could, knowing that I had just destroyed so much of her world.

  She burst into tears. “I can’t handle this! I can’t handle this!” she started screaming. “I need your dad!”

  She ran up to my father’s third-floor study, where my dad and my brother Dan had gathered to set up his new TV. I chased after her and could see my dad’s confusion and fear as she came in bawling.

  “Go ahead! Tell him what you just told me!”

  I repeated the same sentence to him that I had said to my mom. My dad, sitting in his desk chair, put his arms on his head and let out a long sigh of disbelief.

  I stared down at the carpet, waiting for his response. He sat there for another few seconds, thinking. I knew I needed to remain calm, almost like a therapist who was helping them through their emotional processing.

  Dan, a slender state prosecutor with dark hair and a closely trimmed beard, broke the silence. “Well, I have an announcement, too. I’m heterosexual,” he jokingly declared, referencing the fact that he was now the only one of the three kids who was not LGBTQ.

  As my parents continued to take in my announcement, Dan cut through the silence once again: “I always thought you were gay, but I guess this makes sense.”

  I chuckled, but I’m not sure the comment registered with my parents. Seeing my mom uncontrollably sad and confused, my dad went into calm-attorney mode and began asking questions.

  Obviously the first ten questions were some version of “Are you sure?”

  The answer to that question was simple.

  “I’ve never been more certain about anything in my life. I know this as much as I know that I love you two.” Afte
r all, I had spent my whole life thinking about it.

  “I feel like my life is over. I feel like you are dying,” my mom repeatedly cried.

  I had read during my years of research online that my parents would likely feel this way. After all, I was telling them that someone they loved might soon look very different, and they must have felt as if the life they’d imagined for their child was in peril. I’d never find a partner. I’d never find a job. I’d never be welcomed back in our home state.

  “I’m still the same person with the same interests, intelligence, sense of humor, and the same smile,” I said, referencing my nearly constant trademark expression.

  My dad asked about hormones. Not the hormone I was hoping to start taking, estrogen, but rather testosterone. What if they pumped me with testosterone, he asked, searching for a solution.

  I assured him that would, frankly, make matters much worse.

  As the questions went on, it became clear that my parents were struggling with the same empathy gap that I later would realize was one of the main barriers to trans equality among progressive voters: They couldn’t wrap their minds around how it might feel to have a gender identity that differs from one’s assigned sex at birth.

  With sexual orientation it’s a bit easier. Most people can extrapolate from their own experiences with love and lust, but they don’t have an analogous experience with being transgender.

  “The best way I can describe it for myself,” I told them, “is a constant feeling of homesickness. An unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that only goes away when I can be seen and affirmed in the gender I’ve always felt myself to be. And unlike homesickness with location, which eventually diminishes as you get used to the new home, this homesickness only grows with time and separation.”

  My dad, a longtime progressive, also said that he didn’t understand how one could feel like something that is a social construct. Wasn’t gender, and all the things associated with it, just a creation of society? Wasn’t that what feminism had taught us?

  I explained to him that, for me, gender is a lot like language. Language, too, is a social construct, but one that expresses very real things. The word “happiness” was created by humans, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that happiness is a very real feeling. People can have a deeply held sense of their own gender even if the descriptions, characteristics, attributes, and expressions of that gender are made up by society.

  And just as with happiness—for which there are varying words, expressions, and actions that demonstrate that same feeling—gender can have an infinite number of expressions. We can respect that people can have a very real gender identity while also acknowledging that gender is fluid and that gender-based stereotypes are not an accurate representation of the rich diversity within any gender identity.

  All of these answers helped them intellectualize my news but did little to assuage their fears. What would come of my future? The only reference point my parents had for transgender people were punch lines in comedies or dead bodies in dramas. They had no references for success, something that had provided them significant comfort when my brother came out as gay.

  After I went back down to my bedroom, my dad did what I had done for years: He Googled “transgender.”

  Over the course of his research, he came across the report that had become all too familiar to me, “Injustice at Every Turn.” He saw the discrimination and violence faced by the community.

  And then there was the suicide number. Forty-one percent of transgender respondents had reported attempting suicide in their lives. Forty-one percent.

  I had never worried that I would be rejected by my parents or kicked out of the house. Like a lot of children, my biggest fear was much simpler. I didn’t want to disappoint them. Statistically speaking, that made me very lucky.

  While 41 percent of transgender people had attempted suicide, that number dropped by half when the transgender person was supported by their family. And it dropped even further when they were also embraced by their community. My parents made clear from the start that they would support me, but “Injustice at Every Turn” reinforced just how important that support would be in their child’s life.

  * * *

  I awoke the next day at seven a.m. to my parents opening my door. As soon as I opened my eyes and saw them, I could tell that neither had slept, and that the crying, which had subsided by evening, had returned. This time, though, both of them were sobbing.

  My parents walked to either side of my bed and got in with me, still crying. They both held me and pleaded again and again: “Please don’t do this. Please don’t do this. Please don’t do this.”

  I let them cry and tried to tell them that it would be okay, but I couldn’t provide them with the response they hoped for. I hated to see my parents cry. Nothing I had ever done had caused them so much pain, and it ate at me to know that my life was making their lives harder. But there wasn’t a choice here, and I knew the alternative was far worse for all of us. I knew I had made the right choice. The only choice.

  But for the next few days, I witnessed my parents mourn the “death” of their son, alternating between the different stages of grief, as my mom stared at pictures of me as a child. It was surreal, and all I could do was continue to tell them I wasn’t going anywhere. I told them over and over again that they were keeping me, while gaining a daughter.

  But it took my oldest brother, Sean, ten years my senior, to put things into perspective for them.

  Sean had called to wish us a merry Christmas, and when my mom told him my news, he hopped in the car with his husband and made his way straight down to Delaware, frantically searching everything and anything about “transgender” along the way. Sean was always a calm voice of reason in our family and, as an openly gay man, felt like an ally in the back-and-forth with my parents.

  Sitting downstairs with my mom, Sean took some of the load off me and answered some of their questions. I think he also knew that my news was so shocking that having a second person to validate what I had said would help my parents digest the reality of the situation.

  “What are the chances? I mean, what are the chances I have both a gay son and a transgender child?” my mom asked Sean.

  “Mom, what are the chances a parent finds out that their child has terminal cancer?” Sean, a radiation oncologist, replied. “Your child isn’t going anywhere. No one is dying.”

  It was the response she needed. She needed someone to push back and not feel sorry for her. She needed someone to put things into perspective.

  Soon enough, I hoped we would all come to the place where she could ask that same question, “What are the chances?,” out of awe and not out of self-pity—a place where my parents could see that they had raised children who were confident and strong enough to live their truths and whose different perspectives enhanced our family’s beauty.

  But that was for another day. This was a start, and I considered myself very fortunate.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Hi, I’m Andy….I think we’d get along pretty swimmingly.”

  Coming out to my parents was, up until that point, the hardest thing I had ever done in my life. And yet, because of my privilege, it was still relatively easy compared to many others for whom coming out means losing their job, their family, and, potentially, their life. Indeed, family rejection of a child coming out is one of the leading factors in the high rate of homelessness among LGBTQ young people, who make up as many as 40 percent of all homeless youth.

  My fortune was perpetually reinforced as I came out to my friends and other family members over the coming months. Each response was different, ranging from grief to shock to excitement, but all were affirming. And all kept my secret in our circle.

  Next to my parents, the hardest person to tell was Jack Markell. Jack had become like family and I was worried about disappointing him, particularly since he h
ad spent so much time and energy mentoring me. Our relationship was also well known after my public role in his campaign a few years before, and so I even worried that our continued friendship could be a liability for him.

  I had delayed telling him until a few months after coming out to my parents, but eventually it was time.

  Given that he was governor, I wanted to make sure I reached out at a convenient moment. Pacing around my bedroom, I first called Jack’s right-hand man, Brian Selandar, a political operative who had helped orchestrate Jack’s rise to the governorship.

  Brian was up in New York City with the governor when I reached him.

  “I’m not sure how to say this, but I…uh…I’m transgender,” I blurted out to Brian after a few pleasantries. “I’m hoping you can help me tell the governor. Maybe you can even tell him and then let him know to give me a call if he has questions? I don’t want him to feel like he needs to spend a lot of time on this.”

  “Of course,” Brian kindly responded. “He’s on Morning Joe,” referring to the MSNBC morning talk show, “but I can tell him on our way back to Delaware.”

  My stomach was in knots all day as I anticipated a call from Jack after he got the news from Brian. I had run up to campus for a few student government meetings, and as I walked back to my apartment building, my phone rang. It was Jack.

  “Well, that’s big news,” he announced as I answered the phone. I could tell there was a smile on his face as he talked. Phew.

  “Yes, Governor! It’s something I’ve known for a really long time and I’ve finally come to terms with it,” I replied quickly, thinking he didn’t have much time to talk.

  “Tell me about that. I want to hear all about it.”

  I recounted the journey, from self-loathing to self-acceptance to the fear for my future. The call lasted thirty minutes and Jack repeatedly reassured me. “Carla and I love you just as much,” he said, referring to both he and his wife, the first lady of Delaware. “We are here for you just as much as before.”