“Yes, of course you can.”
“I love you,” he said with a warm smile.
“I love you, too,” I responded, and kissed him.
I had known this moment was coming. As a society, we often get so consumed by the gender identity of transgender people that we forget that behind these national debates on trans rights, behind the newspaper stories and policy papers, are real people. Real people who love and laugh, hope and cry, fear and dream—just like everyone else.
When I came out, I never anticipated the possibility of falling in love with another transgender person. It wasn’t that I thought about the potential and dismissed it; the possibility honestly never occurred to me. I grew up so isolated in my own trans identity that I always imagined my life as the only transgender person in my community—a permanent solitary existence. Not devoid of friends or family, just absent anyone else like me. And while two transgender people falling in love is not uncommon in the trans community, it’s certainly the exception, at least in my experience.
Our shared identities had connected us, but our connection was so much deeper. We brought out the best in each other—a mutual undying belief that change is possible. If our interests didn’t always overlap, they almost always complemented one another. And underlying everything was our drive to push equality forward.
When we returned from Barbados, I began slowly moving more and more of my clothes and personal items into Andy’s apartment. My signed Obama campaign poster was placed just under his Hillary-decaled skateboard on the wall. Some of his toy robots had to make way for my Delaware knickknacks. We talked about our future together. I told him I eventually wanted to move back to Delaware, and we talked about how he would be able to continue to work in D.C. or find something in Philadelphia, just a thirty-minute drive from my hometown of Wilmington. At the time, I was also preparing to graduate from American University. And with graduation on the horizon, I started exploring moving home.
My love for Delaware is boundless. I’m known as the ultimate “statriot,” a word my friends made up as a mix between “state” and “patriot.” When anyone asks me where I’m from, I always respond, “The greatest state in the union, Delaware.”
Washington was exciting, but the pace was exhausting. The slower life and the smallness of Delaware were always more attractive to me. It is a state of neighbors, and the closeness of its people allows for a civically engaged person to have an outsized opportunity to effect change. More than anything else, though, Delaware was my happy place. It was a short drive from D.C. and, at least for the time being, Andy. My family was there. My friends were there. Delaware, for me, has always been home.
But as I prepared to graduate, I was faced with a decision that no one should have to make. It’s a decision that is all too common for LGBTQ people: the choice between living in a place we love or being safe and secure. Delaware law, which lacked nondiscrimination protections based on gender identity, wouldn’t allow me and other transgender people to have both. When I returned to Delaware from school on the weekends, it was still legal to deny me service at a restaurant simply because I was transgender. If I moved back after college, I could still be denied a job—or fired from one—because of my gender identity.
Most transgender people in Delaware live with this threat of discrimination every day and don’t have a choice in the matter, lacking the means to move or, understandably, unwilling to leave their family and connections. This everyday threat of discrimination was not a reality exclusive to Delaware. A majority of states, and even the federal government, still lack clear and explicit protections from discrimination for LGBTQ people. While an overwhelming majority of Americans presume that all forms of discrimination against LGBTQ people are permanently and clearly illegal, the reality is surprising and, sadly, far bleaker. And despite our historic progress, in most places in this country, LGBTQ people are still at risk of being fired from their jobs, denied housing, or kicked out of a restaurant or store simply because of who they are.
The promise that we will be judged on our merits at work and ensured equal access to basic necessities no matter our identity is a sacred covenant upheld and defended by our government. It is the foundation for any person to pursue the American Dream, and as I had learned as a little kid reading history books, each generation has been defined by whether or not they opened the doors of equality, opportunity, and prosperity for people long unseen and forgotten.
During the last century, our local, state, and federal governments have, often too slowly, sought to remove barriers and expand opportunity for communities once excluded. It’s the fight that led suffragettes to picket the White House for the right to vote and, later, for women in the 1970s to expand educational opportunities through laws such as Title IX. It’s the cause that propelled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and hundreds of thousands of Black Americans and allies to march on Washington, leading a movement that included the passage of the centerpiece of America’s nondiscrimination laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And it’s the legacy that allowed a Republican president, George H. W. Bush, to stand on the south lawn of the White House to sign the Americans with Disabilities Act and call for those “shameful walls of exclusion [to] finally come tumbling down.”
These protections exist through a series of sometimes complementary and other times overlapping city, state, and federal laws. The most famous of these statutes, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banned certain forms of discrimination in employment, some public spaces, and federal funding.
While most of these laws typically include protections on the basis of characteristics such as race, religion, disability, national origin, and sex, most states and the federal government still do not explicitly include sexual orientation and gender identity in them.
Unlike in Delaware, I was protected when I was at college in Washington, D.C. The District of Columbia had passed clear protections from discrimination for transgender people a decade before. Delaware had passed a nondiscrimination bill for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people in 2009, making it the last state to pass protections for one part of the LGBTQ community while leaving other parts—transgender people—out. Since then, the larger movement has listened to trans voices and rightfully come to the conclusion that it is wrong to leave any part behind, particularly the identities and segments of the community most vulnerable to discrimination or violence.
I wanted nothing more than to go home to Delaware. The possibility of coming back to live, work, and potentially start a family with someone I loved had seemed like such a long shot. But in the past year everything—from the response of my family and community, to my time at the White House, to my budding relationship with an incredible partner—demonstrated that one of the biggest barriers to change was my own misguided belief that certain things were impossible. That something was too hard. That people weren’t ready.
And so I resolved to help change Delaware law to make it inclusive of the needs of transgender people across the state. I joined the board of directors of Equality Delaware, a volunteer role. Equality Delaware, the state’s primary LGBTQ advocacy organization, had started a few years earlier, and since its founding, Delaware had passed sexual orientation nondiscrimination protections in 2009 and laws permitting civil unions, a precursor to marriage equality, in 2011.
The group was led by two attorneys, Lisa Goodman and Mark Purpura. Mark, a tall, bearded openly gay man, had come out four years before and dove headfirst into LGBTQ advocacy.
Lisa, who sported short brown hair with a streak of gray, had been involved in advocacy for a bit longer and was a master at legislative strategy. Lisa is one half of a Delaware political power couple. Her wife, Drew, had been executive director of the Delaware chapter of the ACLU and would later go on to serve as Governor Jack Markell’s chief of staff during the last year of his term.
With Delaware having passed sexual orientation nondiscrimination protections and laws permitting
civil unions in 2009 and 2011, Equality Delaware now set out to close the circle and pass both marriage equality and gender identity protections in 2013. It was a lofty goal. Other states had attempted to do the same—to pass both a marriage equality bill and a nondiscrimination bill in the same year—but none had succeeded. In each instance, elected officials had come back to activists: We’re doing only one of these issues this year. Two is too many.
“The same will happen to you” was the message from other state and national advocates. “They’re going to push marriage because it’s higher-profile and you’ll end up with nothing.”
“I won’t let that happen,” I told the older, more experienced activists who warned me.
Honestly, no one thought we would succeed, save maybe for Mark, Lisa, and me. The gender identity bill alone was an uphill battle, but doing it within a month of the marriage bill would be next to impossible. There was a reason it had never been done before. “Good luck with that” was the nearly universal dismissive reaction from political observers in and out of the state.
Despite my confident assertions, I was unsure if I could fulfill the promises I made to other transgender people that we’d pass the bill. I was twenty-two years old and new to LGBTQ advocacy. Any hope would rest on building relationships with legislators and my current one with the governor. And so I began to work with Equality Delaware and other transgender people to lay the foundation.
A few months earlier, during the summer of 2012, right after coming out publicly as transgender, I met up with Jack Markell. He was in Washington for a college tour with his son, Michael, when he texted me out of the blue.
“Hey, Sarah. Any chance you are free tomorrow to show Michael and me around American University’s campus?”
While he had called me every two weeks after I first told him my news, this would be the first time we interacted in person since I transitioned. It was always nerve-racking “meeting” someone for the first time as me. Inevitably, there’d be some awkwardness, something I just had to force myself to break through.
I met Jack and Michael in the middle of the open green quad at the center of AU’s campus. Jack greeted me with a huge hug and we began to make our way around campus, but as I tried to show him around, he kept interrupting my tour to ask me questions about gender and trans identities. I could tell Jack was taking me in, and knowing that Michael was unlikely to actually attend AU, I welcomed the opportunity to educate him.
“You still want to come back to Delaware, right?” Jack asked me, aware that I had always wanted to move back.
I thought about my answer for a second. “I do, but I’m honestly nervous to come home. I can’t come back to a state that doesn’t protect transgender people from discrimination.”
I told him about the pervasive discrimination and the culture of violence that many, particularly trans women of color, fear every day due to the not-so-random toxic mix of transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, and racism in this country. Delaware needed to join the growing list of states—fourteen at the start of 2013—that protected trans people from discrimination in employment, housing, and public spaces.
Jack thought for a moment, then looked me in the eyes and said with a determined tone, “Okay. Let’s change that.”
If anyone could help push through legislation that would protect transgender rights, it was Jack.
That fall, while I interned at the White House, Jack had won reelection by a landslide of epic proportions, nearly 70 percent of the vote. A few months after the election, Jack publicly declared his support for marriage equality and made clear he would support an effort to legalize same-sex marriage in Delaware during that legislative session year.
While it wasn’t news to me, I was thrilled by this public declaration, but the concern that the trans equality bill would be scrapped entirely in the effort to pass a marriage equality bill rushed back to the forefront of my mind. I wanted to pass each of the bills and Delaware’s LGBTQ community deserved both; same-sex couples deserved and needed the right to marry, and transgender people, who didn’t even have basic protections from day-to-day discrimination, desperately needed action.
One of our first steps was to schedule a more formal meeting with Jack and his staff to discuss strategy for both bills. The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer civil rights organization, was working closely with Equality Delaware to provide support in our historic undertaking, and a representative from the organization would join us for the meeting with the governor.
Ahead of the legislature’s six-month session, we made our way to Jack’s office in Wilmington. It had been four years since I was in the governor’s office, located on the top floor of a large state office building downtown. After we waited for a few moments in a conference room, Jack and his chief of staff entered from a side door that led to his private office. I had been in that room many, many times while working for the governor, and I knew Jack like a family member. Still, I was nervous in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. This was my first time on the outside, advocating in.
After exchanging pleasantries, we launched into the plans Equality Delaware and the Human Rights Campaign had for the coming legislative session. The Human Rights Campaign would be sending field staff to Delaware to help organize an issue-based campaign that was unprecedented for the state.
Sitting there, though, my palms were sweaty and my heart was racing. I knew Jack walked into the meeting supportive, but this was the time to see whether he was as committed as he seemed in that conversation on AU’s campus the previous summer.
I was prepared and ready to interject whenever the conversation steered too exclusively into the marriage bill, but from the start it was clear that this wasn’t necessary. Every time we talked about marriage, Jack would pipe up:
“And what about the nondiscrimination bill?”
“You’re planning the same for the trans bill?”
“That will be the same for the gender identity bill, right?”
He was determined and was making it clear that both bills were a priority for him.
He closed the meeting with an unexpected declaration: “We need to pass the marriage bill, but we really need to pass the nondiscrimination bill.” It was clear that Jack wasn’t like other state leaders when it came to LGBTQ issues. Two bills weren’t too many. I was relieved, but mostly proud of Jack.
While his commitment was integral to pushing the bill, he wasn’t the only statewide elected official we hoped to gain support from. Since we anticipated that opponents of the gender identity bill would import talking points from the fight for trans rights in other states, we knew we needed help from an elected official with strong public safety credentials.
In other battles for trans rights, anti-equality activists and politicians had stoked unfounded fears that protecting transgender people from discrimination throughout daily life, including in restrooms, would allow sexual predators to dress up as women to harm or assault women and, particularly, young girls.
The argument was completely disingenuous. A person intent on committing a crime in a restroom is offered no cover from laws that merely protect transgender people from discrimination or harassment. More than a dozen states and more than a hundred cities had passed similar bills without any problems of that kind. These arguments were just recycled talking points from previous gay-rights fights.
“Protect our children,” read the antigay signs in the 1970s and ’80s. “Preserve parents’ rights to protect their children from teachers who are immoral and who promote a perverted lifestyle.” Just as these arguments preyed on people’s stereotypes and ignorance about gay identities, so too do these new antitrans arguments. They feed on the lack of understanding of trans identities. They were wrong and false then and they are wrong and false now, but they were politically potent.
Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, a
smart, young, handsome elected official, had made protecting children from sexual assault a centerpiece of his time in office. The son of Delaware’s longtime senator and U.S. vice president Joe Biden, Beau was a rising star in the national Democratic Party. He had skyrocketed to the nation’s public consciousness with a heartfelt and compelling introduction of his dad at the 2008 Democratic National Convention and had served as a JAG officer in Iraq during his father’s first term as vice president.
Like Jack, Beau was a former boss of mine. When I was sixteen years old, I had interned on Beau’s first race, his successful 2006 campaign for attorney general. He won in a close contest against a longtime state prosecutor and was sworn in early the next year.
Beau and I hit it off on the 2006 campaign, and four years later, I returned to work for his reelection campaign during the summer of 2010. In that role, I occasionally revisited the old responsibilities I had with Jack, serving as a traveling aide and driver for Beau. While campaigning together up and down the state, we were often asked if I was Beau’s kid because of our similar smiles and comfortable rapport.
I’d occasionally hold over Beau’s head the fact that voters would think he was old enough to have a kid my age, but he was the type of boss who didn’t mind a harmless ribbing. Beau was eminently down-to-earth and notably compassionate. Similar to Jack, he was the type of elected official who was exactly the same behind closed doors as he was out in public.
When I was coming out to close friends and family, I had wanted to come out to Beau personally, but given his national profile, I held off on reaching out, worried that I would burden him. Instead, Beau learned about my news through my public coming-out note. That evening, I got a call from him.
“Sarah,” he started. I was struck by his seamless adoption of my new name. “It’s Beau. I just saw your coming-out note.”
Tomorrow Will Be Different Page 10