Trans woman's road to DNC included ties to Markell, Biden

On Christmas morning of 2011, Sally McBride's two sons opened their presents in their west Wilmington home.

Button-down shirts with ties, same as always. Polite thanks all around.

McBride's youngest, a politically active college student in Washington, D.C., quietly went upstairs. When he came back down, he told his mother he was rethinking returning to Delaware after graduation.

"I'm transgender," he said, dropping a bomb and a 21-year burden.

McBride, a former high school guidance counselor, cried. She screamed. "Are you positive?"

"I was devastated," she remembered. "I thought her life was over. I thought my life was over because you're only as happy as your child."

Her child, since renamed Sarah and now national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, was resolute. And Thursday, less than four years after Sarah McBride vowed that she was done wasting her life as someone she wasn't, she became the first transgender person to speak at a major party convention. Separated by only a few hours, Sarah and the first female presidential nominee in history will stand at the same podium in Philadelphia.

Somewhere in the audience, the McBride family beamed at their poised, resilient daughter, the same one they had feared would never land a job, never raise a family and never be able to walk down the street in peace.

"Today in America, LGBTQ people are targeted by hate that lives in both laws and hearts," Sarah told the audience. "Many will struggle just to get by. But I believe tomorrow can be different. Tomorrow, we can be respected and protected, especially if Hillary Clinton is our president."

As soon as Sarah's name was mentioned, members of the Delaware delegation cheered loudly alongside other delegates and gave Sarah a standing ovation.

Her selection is a tribute to Delaware's progress on protecting LGBT rights and sends a clear message that transgender individuals "have a voice in the political process, that they are going to be safe and protected," according to Lisa Goodman, a Delaware superdelegate and president of Equality Delaware, an LGBT advocacy organization.

In 2013, after intense lobbying by Sarah and others, the state passed the Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Act, affording transgender Delawareans the same legal protections already granted on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation, among other characteristics. A transgender person is someone who is born as a male or female, based on body parts, but identifies with the other gender. Roughly 2,800 transgender men and women live in Delaware, according to Equality Delaware.

Last year, Gov. Jack Markell signed legislation allowing prison inmates to seek a name change based on their gender identity, making Delaware the first state in the nation with such a law, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

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And, earlier this year, Delaware became the 15th state to ban insurance companies from limiting or excluding health care coverage for transgender people.

Markell met Sarah when she was a witty middle-schooler – back when she was known by her male name. (Sarah asked that her birth name not be included in this article because she believes it never truly represented who she is).

Markell later enlisted Sarah to work on his first gubernatorial campaign and credited his victory, in part, to her tenacity and ability to organize large groups at campaign events. When it came time to weigh the Gender Identity Nondiscrimination bill, Sarah put a human face on a problem usually seen in the abstract, the governor said.

"I think she will be one of the best examples ever of somebody when they are true to themselves they are able to achieve all of the dreams they set forth," he said this week.

Sarah came out to Markell in early 2012, shortly after coming out to her family. She needed his recommendation for a White House internship, minus the "he" pronoun.

The two chatted on the phone while Markell was on the train.

"Well, that is big news," Sarah recalled Markell saying. "You know that I am so proud of you, and Carla and I love you very much."

Sarah (no relation to Senate Majority Leader David McBride) said she received the same unqualified support from the late Attorney General Beau Biden and his family. She had worked on Beau Biden's campaigns and the two families were close.

"You are still a member of the Biden family," Biden told Sarah after hearing the news. "Hallie and I support you and love you."

"He was a class act," Sarah remembered.

Sarah had faced these conversations with trepidation. But time and again, Delaware had her back, from the political elite to the neighbor down the street.

"The great thing about Delaware being as small as it is," said her father, Dave, is that "friendship trumps ideology."

Donald Trump, himself, is another story. Earlier this month, the party endorsed dialing back LGBT rights by invoking “natural marriage” and states’ rights for determining which bathrooms transgender people may use, and permitting merchants to deny service to gay customers as a point of religious freedom. According to members of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay rights group, it was "the most anti-L.G.B.T. platform in the party’s 162-year history.”

Trump's running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, has been an outspoken opponent of equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens over his career.

But in Philadelphia, Sarah said recently, “There are so many aspects of this convention that provide a stark contrast to the hate and fear of the Republican Party Convention.”

Added her father: "What kind of community do you want? Do you want a community that shuns a portion of the community and makes their lives miserable and subjects them to abuse?"

Coming home

Every birthday wish, every bedtime prayer, every penny thrown in the fountain, Sarah asked to be a girl. She recalls looking in the mirror, trying to force herself to say "transgender," but stopping short out of fear and shame.

She knew since she was in elementary school when she caught an episode of "Just Shoot Me" featuring a transgender female character. The joke was that people were actually attracted to her.

"My heart dropped in that moment," she said recently.

So, Sarah kept her truth hidden from everyone, trying to rationalize that if she succeeded in a noble profession like politics, lifting up the disenfranchised, she'd feel complete.

Everyone told her she could make it in politics. “What a privilege,” she thought, “I shouldn’t sacrifice that.”

"I knew that the moment I confided to someone, I’d have to admit it to myself," she said.

Sarah recently likened the internal struggle to a feeling of homesickness that never goes away. Until you're at home with yourself.

By fall of her junior year in college, she was serving as student body president but still living in her head. She felt that she couldn't enjoy any activities unless she reimagined doing them as a girl.

At American University, Sarah advocated for gender-neutral housing, a sexuality and queer studies minor and insurance coverage for transgender transition care.

After telling a couple close friends about her journey, she was determined to share it with her parents. Worried that they would be disappointed, Sarah also instinctively knew that they would never abandon her. When her brother, Sean, told the family he was gay during his senior year in college, he was enveloped in support.

In Sean's case, the family had a frame of reference, remembered Dave. Everywhere, he saw examples of successful gay individuals. But Dave didn't know any transgender people. He didn't really know what gender identity meant.

What he learned, he said, is that it's not a "choice."

The Wilmington lawyer sought out tangible evidence on the internet. What he found terrified him. Forty-one percent of transgender individuals try to kill themselves at some point in their lives, compared with 4.6 percent of the general public, according to a recent study by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the Williams Institute.

But the rates drop dramatically when transgender people feel supported by their families and communities.

Three days after being introduced to her new daughter, Sally McBride couldn't sleep or eat. Her son had dressed up as a girl on occasion for Halloween but she thought nothing of it. He had girlfriends in high school and college.

Mom urged Sarah to wait until after college to reveal her identity, perhaps in a faraway place like California where she would be judged on her merits instead of receiving quizzical looks.

"If you stay here, you will be known as Sarah the trans woman," Sally said. "I didn't want her to be solely defined as trans."

But Sarah was adamant that she couldn't wait.

"She didn't want to miss one more day of being her true authentic self," mom said.

The week Sarah's student president term ended in the spring of 2012, her headline in the college newspaper made national headlines. It was even retweeted by Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation.

In the column, Sarah spoke of "golden handcuffs," a blessed life that threatened to crumble over gender identity.

"As difficult as this has been for my family and me, the experience highlights my own privilege," she wrote. "From day one, I never worried about my family loving and accepting me. But for far too many trans people, the reality is far bleaker."

Sarah and her family declined to speak about the specifics of her transition.

Sarah became the first openly transgender person to intern at the White House. While there, she met her future husband, Andy, a transgender man and activist.

He proposed to her after being diagnosed with cancer. They married in August of 2014 on the rooftop of their apartment in Washington, with Sarah's father walking her down the aisle.

Five days later, Andy died while Sarah held his head and their new wedding bands touched.

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The relationship underscored for Sarah that "change cannot come fast enough." Or in the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “The fierce urgency of now."

With so much change afoot over the last few years, Sarah isn't sure if she will see the first transgender president in her lifetime. Last month, two women named Misty became the first transgender candidates to earn Democratic congressional nominations in Utah and Colorado.

Part of a generation that was never limited to voting only for white men for office, she plans to return to Delaware and remain involved in government. She has won multiple awards and presented on gender equity at TEDxMidAtlantic.

The attention works both ways, she explained.

"Whatever I’m able to do can blaze a trail and show people that dreams and their identities are not mutually exclusive. That’s a blessing," she said.

"But it’s also certainly a burden to always have that qualification on what I’m doing. To not just have my talents, skills and merit be the center of the conversation."

While working for the Center for American Progress, Sarah traveled to North Carolina after the state passed a controversial law that forces transgender residents to use the bathroom that corresponds to their sex at birth.

Sarah snapped a selfie in a women's bathroom, and it went viral.

"There are real people that just need to use the bathroom" without subjecting themselves to potential violence, she said. "When we talk about this, the humanity is often lost."

Sally was shocked the first time she saw Sarah wearing jeans, a flirty top, a headband and a ring. Her daughter parked in the alley so as not to attract attention. Since that time, she rarely calls Sarah by her old name. Mother and daughter agreed to purge all photos pre-transition from age 10 on.

"I do believe I’ve gotten to the point – just within this last year – when I think of my third child, I think of her as a woman," Sally said. "It is comfortable. It’s easy. It’s almost that’s always the way it was.”

At a speech before the Human Rights Campaign last year, Jill Biden praised the McBrides for setting an example.

"Their embrace never yielded, from the morning she came out to them, to the afternoon her father walked her down the aisle, to the evening she lost her husband," Biden said. "Isn't that what parents are supposed to do?"

The McBrides deflect the praise to their compassionate network of friends, the Delaware Democratic Party and to their church, Westminster Presbyterian in Wilmington.

If everyone just had a little bit of courage, Dave said, "then no one has to be a hero.”

Contact News Journal reporter Margie Fishman at (302) 324-2882, on Twitter @MargieTrende or mfishman@delawareonline.com.