Democrat Sarah McBride is running for Delaware's only House seat in November. If she wins, she would become the country's first openly transgender member of Congress.
If she wins Delaware’s only House seat in November, the Democrat is poised to become the country’s first openly transgender member of Congress.
A decade later, on Christmas Day in 2011, McBride came out to her parents as a transgender woman. Her mother, Sally, said looking back, she’s not proud of how she and Dave initially reacted.“We knew we’d do whatever she needed us to do, but I thought her life was over,” Sally said from an armchair in McBride’s childhood home in Wilmington. “I thought she’d be discriminated against at every turn. I was frightened for her safety.
The energy McBride brings to politics sometimes feels similar to that of Leslie Knope from “Parks and Recreation.” When she arrived at the first of 15 polling locations at 7:15 a.m. on primary day, she stepped out of the car, coffee in hand, and yelled, “Can you feel the democracy in the air?” Though she excelled in politics, McBride wrote that since she was a child, she felt like she was living someone else’s life. She knew she was transgender from a young age, but her earliest exposure to trans people was through jokes about them on TV. She said she threw herself into politics in part to create a more loving and inclusive world where others could be themselves, even if she couldn’t.
Lisa Goodman, the founding president of Equality Delaware, a statewide LGBTQ organization, worked at the same law firm as McBride’s father. After McBride came out, Dave and Sally talked to Goodman in her office for three hours, Goodman remembered, and she said two things that stuck with them. “At the end of the day, we can say the right things,” McBride said. “But if we aren’t actually able to deliver real and tangible results for people, if we aren’t actually able to deliver change, then none of it matters. And I think he really, more than any person I’ve ever met, was able to bridge all of those, not just complexities, but in many cases contradictions, and figure out how to move forward.
When McBride and Cray moved in together in 2013, she “felt more fulfilled and happier than I’d ever imagined.” But then Cray was diagnosed with oral cancer after seeing a doctor about a sore on his tongue. After surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, he was declared cancer-free in the spring of 2014 only for the cancer to return a few months later. As Cray, who was just 28, became increasingly ill, McBride was his caretaker.
“It was sort of a moment of political genius that was so centered on caring about the policy, and yes, about her legacy, but a legacy about getting paid leave right in Delaware, and not about being seen as this conquering hero who ran roughshod over people to do it,” Chadderdon said. In between knocking on constituents’ doors the day before the September primary, McBride said that dysfunction is why she’s running.
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