Tomorrow Will Be Different

by Sarah McBride

  He was driving with his wife, Hallie, and wanted to call to express his love and continued friendship. “I’m here with Hallie and we just want you to know that we love you, we stand with you, and you are still as much a part of the Biden family as ever. This doesn’t change anything.”

  A few weeks after my meeting at the governor’s office, I reached out to Beau to get together, catch up, and talk about the gender identity nondiscrimination bill. I told him we’d need his help to push back on the lies that would inevitably come from our opponents. I worried that bringing up the counterarguments to our bill might cause Beau to beg off, not wanting to get into the middle of a controversial fight. But he was unequivocal in his support and his willingness to help.

  “Just let me know what you need,” he assured me.

  Two weeks later, I ran into Beau again at the vice president’s official residence, the Naval Observatory, in Washington, D.C., at an event celebrating the second inauguration of President Obama and Beau’s father. He informed me that one of his top deputies, the head of his Child Predator Unit, Patty Dailey Lewis, would be working with us to pass the gender identity bill. It might seem weird that the head of the child predator office would be running point for our trans equality bill, but Patty was perfect. She was a kind middle-aged woman who worked on defending children from sexual assault, and there was no one better positioned to push back against the myth that trans protections would embolden those wishing to sexually assault young girls in bathrooms.

  After talking with Beau, I made my way across the tent to say hello to Vice President Biden and potentially grab a picture with him. I hadn’t spoken to the vice president since coming out, although I had seen him several times while interning at the White House. I walked up to him with my phone in hand, ready to ask for a picture. But before I could even say anything, he put both arms on my shoulders and looked me square in the eyes.

  “Hey, kiddo. I just want you to know that Beau is so proud of you, Jill is so proud of you, and I’m so proud of you. I wanna know one thing, are ya happy?”

  “I am,” I responded, taken aback that he had even heard about my transition.

  “That makes me so happy. Give me a hug!” He pulled me in for an enveloping embrace, a quintessential gesture for the gregarious vice president.

  It was a powerful moment for me. As much as I had cherished that signed Joe Biden schedule growing up, this small interaction meant infinitely more to me. If meeting Joe Biden at eleven had assured me of my love of politics, his embrace at twenty-two helped confirm my belief that despite the cynicism that surrounds politics, there are still good and decent people in the arena. And with the support of both the Bidens and the Markells strongly behind us on the gender identity bill, I felt prepared for the fight to come in Delaware.

  Unfortunately, support from statewide elected officials, even powerful ones such as Jack and Beau, could get us only so far. To pass the bill, we would need to convince a majority of legislators in both chambers—at least twenty-one members of the State House and eleven members of the State Senate—to vote in favor of the Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Act of 2013.

  While the Democrats controlled both houses, Delaware’s leading party had always been notoriously cautious. Conservative Democratic elected officials from the southern part of the state, although shrinking in numbers, had blocked social progress for decades. And even in 2013, the number of conservative Democrats and Republicans was still large enough that we would need to hold every progressive Democrat in both chambers and gain at least one Republican in the State Senate.

  Joe Biden was a giant to me growing up; he and his son demonstrated such compassion after I came out.

  Our bill was not likely to come up for another few months, in May or June of that year, as they always hold the most controversial bills until near the end of session. But beginning in January, every day that the legislature was in session and I was not in class, I would drive to our state capitol in Dover, sometimes with Lisa and Mark from Equality Delaware, often with my mom, and when he was able to get out of work, my dad would join, too. While my parents were still getting used to my transition, they didn’t hesitate when I asked them to join me to lobby for the bill. As they has made clear, they supported me and would stand by me no matter what.

  Delaware’s capitol, Legislative Hall, is a colonial redbrick building modeled after Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the founders declared independence and signed the U.S. Constitution. It sits at the end of a large green in the heart of Dover’s government district. By state-capitol standards, Legislative Hall is on the smaller side, which only adds to the bustling atmosphere of tourists, lobbyists, activists, and legislators who fill the halls each day the General Assembly meets.

  While we worked to assemble a larger army of transgender people to advocate for the bill, I effectively camped out at Legislative Hall. One by one, I’d meet with lawmakers. We started with friendly legislators and worked our way out.

  At first, I felt lost. I had been so used to advocating on behalf of others—candidates or a student body—that I didn’t quite know how to explicitly advocate for myself. I wanted to talk about facts and statistics. I thought that if I could present the most cogent case, my arguments would win the day. Talking about myself felt self-indulgent.

  I didn’t know how to be personal in my approach, but I’d watch legislators react to my parents—many of them were moms and dads themselves and sympathized with my parents’ fears. My mother would tell legislators through inevitable tears, “We were so scared when Sarah came out. All any parent wants is for their child to be happy, healthy, and fulfilled.”

  Watching her get through to them successfully, I felt like my voice didn’t really matter. “I don’t know, I just don’t feel like I’m connecting,” I expressed to my mom in the car ride back from Dover one day. “I feel like I’m useless.”

  But my voice did matter. It just turned out that I wasn’t actually using it. What I was saying could have been offered by anyone. Making a cogent case wasn’t my job; I needed to make a compelling case. I was ignoring the emotion that was at the heart of my own progressivism: empathy.

  I had understood the importance of building empathy during my time at the White House, but the moment I went from subtly educating to blatantly advocating, I abruptly forgot that lesson. In part, I think I moved to what felt like colder and more distant arguments so that I could protect myself from feeling personally rejected if the bill failed. I knew that for many of these legislators, I was the face that came to their minds when the bill was discussed, and that reality would escalate in the months ahead.

  How could I not take it personally, though? For all of us, the political is personal. And the truth is this: Sometimes vulnerability is the best, or only, path to justice. Those with power or privilege won’t extend equality easily. Logic isn’t enough. The legislators had to see that transgender people are people. They had to understand our fears. Our hopes. They had to see our families. They had to feel the humanity of the issue. And then, we hoped, they would no longer be able to look us in the eyes and deny us the equal protection of the laws they swore to uphold.

  There had been a debate about which bill would come first, the marriage bill or the trans bill. I discussed the point extensively with Lisa, Mark, and the rest of the Equality Delaware board. I started to worry that the warnings of the older activists would come to fruition if we pushed the marriage bill first.

  “Legislators will be exhausted after the marriage fight,” I said to Lisa and Mark. “They won’t have any energy left for the fight that they are less excited about.”

  Lisa is a “legislator whisperer” if there ever was one. “I actually think the legislators will be energized after the marriage fight,” she said. “They will feel empowered after making history and they’ll be fired up to do it again.”

  It was a risky ga
mble, but if accurate, it was likely the best bet to pass both. The fact of the matter remained that the trans-rights bill likely wouldn’t have had the same impact of energizing legislators.

  While we laid the foundation on the trans-rights bill by meeting with legislators and developing relationships, the marriage equality bill moved forward. On April 23, it passed the State House by a vote of twenty-three to eighteen, and three weeks later, the bill came to the Senate floor.

  Activists had swarmed Legislative Hall in anticipation of its passing, and Governor Markell had promised to sign the bill immediately upon passage. I sat in the gallery to watch the final vote. Debate stretched on for hours in the Senate. At one point, an older conservative Democrat stood up in opposition to the marriage bill.

  “And what’s next?” the eighty-five-year-old senator cried in his deep southern accent. “We pass this bill today and we know they’ll come back to us with that transgender bill!”

  Eventually, after a long debate, the marriage equality bill passed by a vote of twelve to nine, and just two hours later, Jack stood behind a small desk on the landing of the grand staircase in the middle of Legislative Hall surrounded by hundreds of celebrating advocates.

  “Tonight, with the signing of this law,” he proclaimed, “we say to any Delawarean, regardless of sexual orientation: If you have committed yourself to somebody, and you’ve made that pledge to spend your life together in partnership, your love is equally valid and deserving and your family is now equal under the law.”

  He sat down at the desk with the seal of the state of Delaware on its front. Several pens sat before him as he signed each letter with a different one, handing the pens to Lisa, Mark, and several lawmakers as souvenirs. He put the last pen down and stood up with the bill in his hand, thrusting it into the air to thunderous applause and countless flashes of cameras.

  I was exceptionally proud to have worked for Jack that day and moved by the history we were witnessing, but I could feel the butterflies in my stomach as we jubilantly walked out of Legislative Hall. The marriage bill had passed. Now eyes turned to the trans equality bill.

  Showtime.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Please pass this bill.”

  DELAWARE TRANSGENDERS MAKE BID FOR EQUALITY read the front-page headline above the fold in the Sunday News Journal, Delaware’s main paper. The grammatical error aside—transgender is an adjective, not a noun—the headline announced that the time for our bill had arrived. I could almost hear the disbelief and skepticism that had been expressed to me across the state: “Good luck with that.”

  We were going to need all the luck we could get. After the successful effort to pass the 2013 marriage bill, Equality Delaware’s board of directors and its field team, assembled with support from the Human Rights Campaign, hunkered down for the next battle: passage of the Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Act of 2013.

  Over the preceding weeks, we had secured our top goals for prime sponsors, the legislators who would lead the effort in the Senate and House on our bill. In the House, based on Lisa’s recommendation, I met with Representative Bryon Short, a small-business owner respected by both sides of the chamber, and asked him to serve as the primary sponsor in the lower house of the General Assembly. He initially asked to think about it but quickly came back with an emphatic yes, possibly a by-product of a conversation with his progressive and fiercely politically active wife.

  In the Senate, we had the two highest-ranking women in the chamber serve as our co-leads: Senators Margaret Rose Henry and Patty Blevins. Henry, then majority whip, is a progressive figure who could also personally speak to the evils of discrimination as an older Black woman who had been in politics for two decades. She would serve as the bill’s “floor manager,” helping to steer the legislation through committee and then lead the debate on our side when it came before the full Senate.

  Blevins, the chamber’s president pro tempore, the top figure in the majority caucus, is a warm but unassuming woman who, through her position, had control over the Senate’s calendar. Both are incredibly smart and, as longtime legislators, understood the Senate better than anyone.

  As we prepared for introduction of the trans equality bill, we worked to build momentum, meeting day in and day out with legislators while our field team knocked on doors and made calls. To begin to foster public support and demonstrate the backing of leading statewide elected officials, Governor Markell wrote a Huffington Post op-ed calling for passage in clear and personal terms: “Kindness, decency, and fairness are the values that Delawareans live by on a daily basis. They are the values I have encountered in towns and cities throughout Delaware. We look out for one another in this state of neighbors. Yet, for years, we have left one group of our friends, relatives, and colleagues behind. And it is past time to make things right.”

  Just ninety-six miles north to south, Delaware is larger than only Rhode Island among all of the United States. The “small-town feel” fosters a neighborly atmosphere in a state where everyone has, as the saying goes in Delaware, “dated, mated, or is related to” one another.

  As a former business executive, Jack went on to straightforwardly outline the economic case for building a diverse and inclusive state, but then he got personal.

  “While this law will benefit our state and our economy, it also goes to the core of who we are as a community. My young friend Sarah, who just graduated from college in Washington, D.C., and happens to be transgender, has told the first lady and me about her fear of returning to Delaware, the state she loves, without basic protections. There are countless more transgender Delawareans who live in fear of or face discrimination on a daily basis. As a lifelong Delawarean, I’m convinced this is not the Delaware I know and love.”

  Beau Biden, whose deputy, Patty Dailey Lewis, was scheduled to join us for the hearings and floor votes, filmed a short online video declaring his public support and dedicating his office to fight for passage of the nondiscrimination law. He talked about the need for equal protection under the law and protections from discrimination and violence based on gender identity or expression.

  And like Jack, he closed by getting personal. Talking about our relationship, he said, “A young friend of mine, who is transgender, has spoken to me about her fear of living without basic legal protections. For her and for all of our transgender citizens, I want you to know this: I support providing protection from violence and discrimination based on gender identity and expression under Delaware law, and I will work with our General Assembly to provide such protections this year.”

  The messages helped to demonstrate that the gender identity bill was a mainstream position and communicated to inherently skittish legislators that they wouldn’t have to stand alone, that these two popular statewide elected officials would stand with them. And reading and watching these two messages, I knew that Jack and Beau were also standing with me. They had already done so much for me, through their friendship and mentorship.

  A year prior, as I prepared to come out, I worried that even our past friendships might hurt them politically. But now here they were, sticking their necks out for me and for so many people just like me across the state.

  * * *

  Lisa, Mark, and I had spent months meeting with dozens of legislators, reciting the same stories and statistics over and over again. We’d received strong messages of support from many of these state legislators, and we had our prime sponsors in place and ready to defend the bill on the floor. Our next step was an important one: a whip count. It seems simple enough on its face: You poll the legislators to see who is a yes, who is a no, and who remains undecided.

  In reality, getting answers in a whip count is closer to herding cats. We had to track down the legislators to confirm how they planned to vote in whatever ways we could find them, which often meant stopping by their offices unannounced or waiting outside their offices to walk them to their next meeting. Some la
wmakers are difficult to find, oftentimes intentionally, when they know you’re not going to like their answer. Setting dignity aside, I was forced to stake them out, waiting outside a meeting or even outside a bathroom to get their attention when they least expected it.

  While prime sponsors are the leads on the bill, cosponsors are like casual champions. They are a little more than just supporters, but they don’t have the responsibility of overseeing the legislation through passage. In the Senate, we secured five cosponsors in addition to Senators Blevins and Henry, and fourteen in the House, including Representative Short. In both instances, we were three-quarters of the way to the minimum number of votes we needed for passage with just our sponsors and cosponsors, a very promising place to be.

  But there are always votes beyond the sponsors and cosponsors. The whip count did more than give us a clearer picture of our bill’s prospects—it also had the impact of forcing legislators to look us in the eye and commit one way or another on the bill. For all the negative stereotypes about politics, the integrity of a person’s word is vital to gaining respect. Legislators understand this and genuinely try to stick to their verbal commitments.

  According to our count, in the House, where a majority is twenty-one, we had twenty-four or twenty-five votes. Potentially more. In the Senate, where we needed eleven votes to pass the bill, we had a firm ten votes, with several more unaccounted for. So we were down to needing one more vote to pass the bill. While the Democrats were in the majority, there were a few in the party who were clear nos, vestiges of an era of conservative Democrats that has slowly dwindled over time, leaving us with two choices to push us over the top: one moderate Democrat or one moderate Republican. We needed only one of them to vote our way.

  After meeting with the moderate Democrat, it was clear we were unlikely to get his backing. He seemed personally distraught over the bill, wanting to support it but concerned he would be getting too far out ahead of his district. He “abhorred discrimination” but worried that both marriage equality and trans rights in one session would be too much for voters to handle.