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

by Sarah McBride

Too often we universalize the need for LGBTQ people to be out in order to move equality forward. This is an unfair burden to bear for an already marginalized community.

I’ve been blessed with a community that does not see my womanhood and “transness” as mutually exclusive. I won’t lose my job or my friends. I’m less likely to face violence. These realities allow me to be public, and in my mind, those privileges call on me to utilize whatever platform I have to try to open hearts and change minds.

Principles are worth something only if you stick by them even when they feel inconvenient.

Sometimes vulnerability is the best, or only, path to justice.

There is no question that opponents of our bill tried to paint transgender people into a caricature, but it’s always a point I want to be careful in pushing back on. Transgender people shouldn’t be treated with dignity because of how some of us look; we should be treated with dignity because we are human beings.

I had realized that I could speak from a place of power if I spoke from a place of authenticity.

She knew the indignity of having to plead for your most basic rights.

A government cannot be “of the people, by the people, and for the people” if wide swaths of the people have no seat at the table, if large parts of the country feel like there is literally no one in their government who can understand what they are going through.

If it were not bathrooms, our opponents would find something else to object to. And clearly they are willing to concoct any kind of scenario, no matter how absurd, to oppose our protections.

When transgender people stand up, when our voices are heard, when we confront these myths about bathrooms head-on, we can make the politics of fear and division, of discrimination and misinformation, ineffective.

“When you ask transgender people to allow a conversation to occur before you grant us equal rights, you are asking people to watch their one life pass by without dignity and respect,” I said.

The discomfort of others shouldn’t be grounds for differential treatment.

had come to terms with the physical risk of advocacy, but that doesn’t mean I should have to tolerate it.

Sometimes we feel like we have to make every part of our story incredibly emotional in order to fit a cliché people have about the trans experience. I’m not going to do that.

My brother Sean, who had watched too many people, including young people, pass away from cancer, had told me that I should take stock in the beautiful acts of kindness that I’d begin to see. “Amazing grace,” Sean called it. “You will bear witness to acts of amazing grace.”

Andy isn’t gone, I thought. He lives on in the change he brought to this world.

When my friends would ask me about dating again, I’d flippantly say, “I’m twenty-four, transgender, and a widow…that’s a lot for someone in this society to handle.”

every day that we rob people of the ability to live their lives to the fullest, we are undermining the most precious gift we are given as humans.

each time we ask anyone—whether they are transgender, Black, an immigrant, Muslim, Native American, gay, or a woman—to sit by and let an extended conversation take place about whether they deserve to be respected and affirmed in who they are, we are asking people to watch their one life pass by without dignity or fairness. That is too much to ask of anyone.

I was angry that people were dying after being denied the right to pursue happiness and wholeness in whatever life they lived.

No longer would we shrink into incrementalism. No longer would we ask for a quarter of a loaf while our community needed a full loaf.

When John passed away a short time later, Jim learned that, despite being legally married in Maryland, the Ohio government would keep his name off John’s death certificate, leaving the category of “surviving spouse” blank. Another indignity imposed on LGBTQ people that extended beyond life and into death.

I tried to use the platform I was given to stress that this wasn’t about how I, or any trans person, looked. It was about who we are. Civil rights shouldn’t depend on appearance.

Message after message told me to take my own life. My phone would illuminate every three seconds with the same message.

I didn’t want young trans kids who followed my social media accounts to see them.

My parents were instinctually nervous about all the attention, but given their limited use of social media, they had no idea of the hate that was coming my way. I couldn’t bear to tell them. I felt completely alone, and honestly, I just wanted Andy.

I never in a million years would have thought strangers telling me to kill myself would have had such a significant impact on my own psyche. I thought I was too old. Too jaded.

As passionate as I was about the work that I was doing, I wondered whether I was strong enough for it. I worried that I didn’t have the confidence for it. I just wanted to curl up into a ball and give up what little platform I had developed.

Society can’t make me feel voiceless when I know the power of my own voice. And society can’t make me feel weak when I know that I am powerful just for being.

I knew I wanted to stress two points. The first was that, despite our progress, a lot of work remains in the fight for LGBTQ, and specifically trans, equality. The second point, and, frankly, the main one, was to remind people that behind this national debate on trans rights are real people who love, fear, laugh, cry, hope, and dream just like everyone else. So often we lose sight of the humanity behind these issues. If I was going to be the first, I wanted to use this opportunity to reinforce the almost absurdly simple point that transgender people are, first and foremost, human.

a friend reminded me of the Maya Angelou quote that had guided much of my advocacy: “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”

Vulnerability is often the first step on the path toward justice. Vulnerability breeds empathy; empathy fosters support; support leads to action.

I worried that my dreams and my identity were mutually exclusive.

“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.”

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 unsee...

“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.”

“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.

People were genuinely terrified about what the future would hold. The Southern Poverty Law Center would later report roughly four hundred hate-based attacks and incidents in the immediate aftermath of the election. Calls to LGBTQ suicide hotlines skyrocketed. Educators were reporting a dramatic increase in bullying toward their Muslim, Latinx, and LGBTQ students.

“But know that no election, no presidency, can change these simple and constant truths: You are worthy, you are beautiful, and you are loved.”

We need each other to fight against whatever attacks come our way.

I know that it can feel like we’re almost lost as a country. But we must never forget that even with all of the hate and all of the challenges, no matter who is president, we can continue to change our world for the better. We’ve done it before and we can do it again.

And they’ll never have to know what this progress felt like, because they will never know anything different.

hope only makes sense in the face of hardship.