Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality

by Sarah McBride

Most people are good, no doubt, but when we are faced with issues we haven’t yet thought about or interacted with, we often look to one another for how we should respond. Our behavior models for others the acceptable reaction; acceptance creates an expectation, while rejection provides an excuse.

Each of us has a deep and profound desire to be seen, to be acknowledged, and to be respected in our totality. There is a unique kind of pain in being unseen. It’s a pain that cuts deep by diminishing and disempowering, and whether done intentionally or unintentionally, it’s an experience that leaves real scars.

It is this trend that links the fight for gender equity with the fight for gay rights with the fight for trans equality: ending the notion that one perception at birth, the sex we are assigned, should dictate how we act, what we do, whom we love, and who we are.

Television, movies, pop culture, fashion, and politics are all trying to tell us what it means to be a “real” woman.

The experience of each woman—cis or trans—is different, but a similar thread underpins it all: the policing of gender. The devaluation of lives, hopes, and one’s body. The threat of violence.

Having certain privileges does not mean that your life is easy or that you do not face challenges. It just means that you don’t experience specific kinds of obstacles or barriers faced by someone with a different identity or background. And our empathy should require us to acknowledge the plight of others in both its similarities to ours and in its differences.

Our identities matter. They help make us who we are and shape our outlook. Existing in them is a radical act, one that requires, in many instances, courage, hard work, and determination. I am a better person because of the experiences and insights that I’ve had because I’m transgender. I’m a more compassionate person than I was before I accepted that part of my identity.

There is no doubt that society places unfair and unjust barriers in front of transgender people, but that is a flaw in society, not a problem with being transgender.

Every person’s life is their own. Their experience is too precious for others to require them to betray their own security or well-being to make a point.

As trans activist Faye Seidler quipped, more Americans said they had seen a ghost than knew a transgender person, according to some polls. For much of the first term of the president’s administration, a similar percentage of White House staffers would likely have said the same thing.

“There are certain lines we should not cross,” he told me. “Yes, hypocrisy is bad, but if exposing that hypocrisy requires us to commit an even greater evil, then we shouldn’t do it. We should challenge people on their ideas. We won’t bring others to our side by harming people, even hypocrites. It may feel satisfying, it may even be in pursuit of the good of revealing hypocrisy, but it violates a first principle.”

I still pushed back. “But these people are harming so many others with their policies.”

“What if you outed someone and they committed suicide because of it?” he shot back. “That’s not an impossible outcome. Is revealing hypocrisy worth someone potentially losing their life? Are you willing to bear the responsibility for that outcome? Is ...

Principles are worth something only if you stick by them even when they feel inconvenient. It’s easy to rationalize and find seemingly altruistic reasons for betraying a moral imperative, but that’s exactly when our principles are most important. We shouldn’t try to build a world in which every person has individual agency over their own gender or sexual orientation by utilizing tactics th...

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.”