Sage advice, no doubt, but as I stood backstage I worried I wouldn’t be able to strike the balance. And then it was time. The announcer’s voice boomed, “Please welcome Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney […] and Sarah McBride.”
“Go, go, go,” the handler backstage whispered to us.
CNN and MSNBC, which hadn’t been covering speeches except for each night’s headliners, interrupted their panels to carry the speeches live on national television.
BREAKING NEWS read CNN’s banner. SARAH MCBRIDE IS THE FIRST OPENLY TRANSGENDER PERSON TO SPEAK AT A MAJOR PARTY CONVENTION.
Chuck Todd interrupted an interview on MSNBC: “I want to go to this. I want to go to this. Let’s take a look here, the first transgender person to ever address a national convention. Her name is Sarah McBride.”
As we stepped onto the stage, the crowd erupted in applause. Oh my God, they care, I thought as I walked out. And making my way across the stage to stand behind Congressman Maloney, I began to hear chanting.
“Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!”
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I tried waving a few times but felt a little foolish. Finally, Congressman Maloney started speaking and the audience was, for the first time that night, quiet. They realized this was a special moment, that they were witnessing a first.
As he spoke, I tried to keep my eyes on him but couldn’t help looking around. And because the arena was so well lit, while standing onstage I could see every single person in the crowd, all the way up to the rafters. It was a sea of tens of thousands of faces staring at me.
Eventually, my eyes caught my parents. The Delaware delegation was seated just to the right of the stage and I could see my mom and dad standing, smiling, next to our state’s junior senator, Chris Coons, and just under the tall, vertical sign—one of many that filled the arena—that read our state’s name.
And then I imagined Andy standing right next to them, watching me and looking as smooth and dapper as he was on our very first date. My mind returned to a conversation that was seared into my memory from the final month of his life.
We were sitting on our big brown couch, Andy scrunched into a ball, crying his eyes out. I remember being taken aback by just how visible the fear was in his eyes and, also, just how blue they appeared through the tears.
“I’m so scared,” he cried. “I’m so sad that I won’t be around to tell you that I love you, to tell you how beautiful you are, and to tell you how proud of you I am.”
It was one of the most emotional conversations I had with him. But because of that, it was also the most vivid—a conversation that had stuck with me as though it had occurred yesterday. And standing on that stage, almost perfectly, I could hear Andy saying those words like he was next to me.
“I love you and I’m so proud of you.”
I was no longer nervous. Finally, my train of thought was interrupted when I heard my name.
“I want to introduce Sarah McBride. Sarah McBride is a courageous young leader, and she is right now the first trans person ever to address a national convention. Sarah…” The audience began screaming, applauding, and chanting. Maloney paused, not wanting to speak over the cheers. Joining in the audience’s excitement, he went off script. “It’s about time,” he said.
Ten seconds later, he continued: “Sarah, it is an honor to make history with you, because we are stronger together.”
Speaking at the convention was a huge honor and a massive responsibility, but it wasn’t about me. It was about all the transgender people seeing our identities affirmed and celebrated on such a large platform.
I walked up to the lectern and got ready to begin. I didn’t want to yell over the cheering crowd, so I paused. I knew time was short, and while they wouldn’t throw me offstage Oscars-style, I didn’t want to go over my time. I improvised a short thank-you line to Congressman Maloney to signal that it was time to start.
I paused for a few more moments to let the cheers die down and then I started my speech: “My name is Sarah McBride and I am a proud transgender American.”
The convention erupted. The screams and chants returned. Delegates and attendees started standing up, cheering.
As I struggled with my gender identity throughout college, I had tried to say the words “I’m transgender” to my mirror. The shame would engulf me and I’d shake my head. “No, I’m not. No, I’m not.”
Now I was standing onstage at the Democratic National Convention as my authentic self, having just declared before the nation that I am a proud transgender American. But as much as that single sentence represented my own transformation, it was really a celebration of the moment. Everyone in that arena knew that with that sentence, a small but important barrier had just been broken.
Little did I know while standing on that stage that online communities of parents of transgender children were posting pictures and videos of their kids watching the speech. As a community, trans people have witnessed a slow but steady embrace of us by Hollywood and the entertainment world. It’s an important milestone, but it also comes with the understanding that it is an industry known for being on the cutting edge of social change.
Politics, on the other hand, almost by definition, is a cautious field. Now, though, watching on television, these young kids were witnessing an arena full of people standing up and enthusiastically applauding the dignity and equality of transgender people. These parents were watching a mainstream political party acknowledge their families in the most explicit way yet. The convention wasn’t applauding me, they were applauding all of us.
As the crowd quieted back down, I continued. “Four years ago, I came out as transgender while serving as student body president in college. At the time, I was scared. I worried that my dreams and my identity were mutually exclusive.
“Since then, though, I’ve seen that change is possible. I witnessed history interning at the White House and helping my home state of Delaware pass protections for transgender people.”
Summing up both the question in the election and our fight for equality, I asked, “Will we be a nation where there’s only one way to love, only one way to look, and only one way to live? Or will we be a nation where everyone has the freedom to live openly and equally? A nation that’s stronger together?”
And then I got very personal. Speaking about Andy, his work, and our relationship always feels like a powerful and comforting way to keep him with me and to keep his legacy alive. I wanted the world to know about my Andy.
“For me, this struggle for equality became all the more urgent when I learned that my future husband, Andrew, was battling cancer. I met Andy, who was a transgender man, fighting for equality and we fell in love. And yet even in the face of his terminal illness, this twenty-eight-year-old, he never wavered in his commitment to our cause and his belief that this country can change. Andy and I married in 2014 and just four days after our wedding, he passed away.
“Knowing Andy left me profoundly changed. But more than anything else, his passing taught me that every day matters when it comes to building a world where every person can live their life to the fullest.”
I spoke about the unfinished work of the movement, the need to pass nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people, violence against transgender women of color, and the continuing HIV and AIDS epidemic.
As I finished my speech, I could still see my parents smiling. Beaming, really. The reception at the end was as warm as at the start, and I walked offstage emotionally and physically exhausted. I had been going nonstop for the previous week and nearly collapsed into the arms of the mayor of Los Angeles, who greeted me backstage as he waited for his turn to speak.
“You were amazing!” he exclaimed as he hugged me.
I walked back into the maze of hallways and stopped. People were swirling around me. A seamstress working the convention approached with tears in her eye
s. She put her arms around me, said how proud of me she was, and enveloped me in a hug.
As she walked away, I continued standing motionless in the hall and I began to cry, partly out of relief, partly out of exhaustion, but also because of the love that had just filled the hall. It was overwhelming.
I made my way out onto the convention floor where all the delegates were seated. As I passed the Pennsylvania delegation, an older transgender woman, Joanne, whom I had met earlier in the year, stood up and walked toward me. Joanne looks like your quintessential grandmother, and exudes the warmth of one.
We were both smiling as she pulled me into a hug. We held on to each other for a couple seconds, and when we pulled away, both of us were crying. She kept her arms at my sides and held me about a foot from her face and said, “I can’t believe I’m seeing this in my lifetime.”
Standing there, I couldn’t help but think of all Joanne had seen. The years of invisibility followed by the years of feeling like a liability. Now she was attending a major party convention with a record number of openly transgender delegates—twenty-eight in total—and she had just witnessed an arena full of people affirming our dignity and celebrating our lives.
For Joanna, it took decades for it to happen, but change came. She saw it in her lifetime.
It’s impossible to describe how powerful that can feel after years, or even decades, of feeling unseen at best and hated at worst. Those of us in the D.C. advocacy world had witnessed over the previous two years the appetite and desire by many elected officials to work on and fight for trans equality. But the rest of the transgender community, let alone the rest of the country, hadn’t.
After wading through the crowd, I finally reached my parents. As I approached, I could see them crying, too. It takes a lot for my dad to cry, so seeing the tears in his eyes really hit me in the gut.
They were so scared when I came out. They were so worried that I’d be rejected by friends and denied opportunities. I hope they know that they don’t have to worry anymore. I hope they know that, at least for me, everything is going to be okay, I wished. With cameras trained on us, I fell into my parents’ arms and broke down. I could barely get the words out without sobbing.
“Did you see that?” I asked them, referring to the reception. “Did you see that?”
At that very same moment, in suburban Maryland, a mom was sitting with her ten-year-old child, watching the convention on television in their family room. Her child had been miserable for years. As she grappled with answers, she kept coming back to one gut feeling, My child is transgender.
Holding on to the child she had assumed was a girl at birth, the mom asked the same question I had just asked my parents. “Did you see that?
“A transgender person just spoke in front of the nation,” she continued. “You can be transgender and be anything you want to be. Transgender people can reach their dreams, too.” She looked down at her child and asked, “Is there anything you might want to tell me?”
The child exhaled, burying their face into the mom’s shoulder.
“I’m a boy, Mom.”
Back in the convention center, I sat down to watch the main event of the evening, the undeniably historic moment when Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.
In her speech, she acknowledged the history of the moment, “Tonight, we’ve reached a milestone in our nation’s march toward a more perfect union: the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for president. Standing here as my mother’s daughter, and my daughter’s mother, I’m so happy this day has come. Happy for grandmothers and little girls and everyone in between.”
The next day, with Hillary Clinton’s words about her historic and empowering accomplishment still reverberating in my mind, I opened a forwarded email from a woman named Ramsey.
I want to personally thank Sarah McBride for her wonderful speech. Below I have included a picture of my seven-year-old transgender daughter watching in awe. She was very inspired and exclaimed “she’s beautiful” when she saw Sarah on TV. It was life-changing for her to see a beautiful, accomplished, intelligent role-model with whom she can identify. I am so grateful that she was given such an important moment at such a young age. I am hoping this email can be forwarded to Sarah so she can see the personal impact she had on one young trans girl.
Attached to the email was a picture of her seven-year-old transgender daughter with long, red wavy hair watching CNN on the family’s TV. And there I was on the screen.
Maybe I had made a little history, too.
CHAPTER 13
Our voices matter.
Two weeks after the convention, I met the little trans girl from the photo, after inviting her and her mom to the HRC office.
“Hi, Lulu, I’m Sarah,” I said, kneeling in order to be eye level with the seven-year-old, who was clearly nervous and a little shy. “What do ya say we go get some juice and your mom and I can have some coffee?”
The three of us walked to a coffee shop a few blocks away and Lulu pulled out a folded piece of paper with a few questions written in big block letters.
“Lulu prepared some questions for you,” her mother explained with a smile.
“Oh, wonderful!” I exclaimed. Lulu adorably smoothed the paper flat to get out the creases. She cleared her throat and began reading her questions.
“Ms. Sarah,” she started, with a slight lisp. “What’s your favorite part about being transgender?”
My favorite part? Growing up, that sentence wouldn’t have made sense to me.
Since coming out, I had been so used to hearing questions about survival or hardship, about negativity and hate. We are inundated with messages that being trans is bad, gross, and a burden for ourselves and others. But Lulu’s question turned that negative perspective on its head. It took more than twenty-five years for me to hear that question for the first time.
I paused and thought about it.
“I think I have three favorite things about being transgender,” I began with a smile. “The first is that it led me to meet my husband, Andy. The second is that I think it’s made me a stronger, better, more compassionate person. And the third? The third is that I get to meet amazing people like you. People who are brave, brilliant, and beautiful.”
Her eyes lit up. Lulu represents the first generation of trans people who, in many cases, have been allowed to grow up as themselves. These youth are insistent, consistent, and persistent in asserting their gender identity, and when coupled with supportive parents and a health-care provider versed on the most up-to-date medical consensus, they are allowed to live practically their whole lives, no matter how long, as their authentic selves.
And despite the hate and pushback they receive from the world, the pride so many of them feel in themselves still leads them to ask that simple but radical question: “What’s your favorite part about being transgender?”
Following the convention, my life changed dramatically. My travel doubled. I was on the road almost constantly, speaking to groups large and small. Two days in New York, two days in Jacksonville, and another two in Miami. Three days in Seattle, a day in Los Angeles, and another in San Francisco. Two in Dallas. One in Virginia. And too many to count in North Carolina, where the state’s incumbent Republican governor, Pat McCrory, was up for reelection. And at each stop along the way, parents would come, bringing along their transgender children.
Each time, I’d ask the trans kids Lulu’s question.
“It means I’m a strong person,” one sixteen-year-old gender-nonconforming youth responded, echoing one of the sentiments in my own answer.
“Trans is beautiful,” proclaimed a fifteen-year-old trans teen in Northern California, quoting Laverne Cox.
“I don’t have to hide anymore,” a nine-year-old trans girl in Fort Lauderdale answered.
In Durham, N
orth Carolina, an eleven-year-old trans boy didn’t beat around the bush. “My favorite thing? That I’m me,” he announced through a big grin.
The parents I met would recount their journeys. In many cases, they had endured horrific bullying from neighbors for embracing and loving their children. Often, they had to fight with their schools for their children to have access to even the most basic necessities, like being called the correct name or being allowed to use the restroom. They’d share their stories through tears, but one common thread existed in each one. They all were hopeful. “Things are changing,” they’d say.
And then November 8, 2016, arrived. I was in North Carolina on Election Day. The Human Rights Campaign had put unprecedented resources—staff, volunteers, and money—into the state, intent on defeating McCrory and sending the message that targeting transgender people for discrimination is not just morally wrong, it’s also bad politics.
The night before, my HRC colleagues and I had joined thousands of fired-up supporters, Lady Gaga, and the Clinton family for the final rally of the 2016 presidential campaign. Hillary walked onto the stage at midnight, just as Election Day arrived, one final time to “Fight Song,” the pop melody that had become her campaign theme song. In the bleachers above her, supporters held up massive letters that spelled “H-I-S-T-O-R-Y.”
The United States was not only about to elect a woman to the highest office in the land, but someone who had laid out the most progressive and inclusive platform of any nominee in history. For the LGBTQ community, her election would solidify all of the federal progress we had seen in the preceding eight years and provide a platform to continue to push our much-needed policy goals forward.
Tomorrow Will Be Different Page 27