Sarah McBride on Why the Left Lost on Trans Rights

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So, Donald Trump, in his inauguration speech, was perfectly clear about what he intended to do.

As of today,

it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.

Starting the day of that speech, Trump launched an all-out effort to roll back trans rights, using every power the federal government had and some that it may not have.

President Trump has signed an executive order which declares the U.S.

government will no longer recognize the concept of gender identity.

President Trump directing the Secretary of Education to create a plan to cut funding for schools that teach what he calls gender ideology.

This afternoon, President Trump makes a move to ban transgender athletes from competing in women's sports.

Ban on gender affirming care for transgender inmates in federal prisons.

Ban on transgender troops serving in the military.

These executive orders, many of them have not actually gone into effect yet.

But when I look across the country, we're already hearing the stories of impact.

In a time when we are struggling to find people to volunteer to do this, we are begging to be allowed to continue our service, and you're just going to wash us away.

So today I'm not okay.

It's a complete dehumanization of transgender people.

years and years and years into who I am.

And I'm supposed to out myself.

It's about privacy and dignity for me to be able to change my passport to mail.

A lot of the things Trump is doing in this term have put him on the wrong side of public opinion, but not this.

In a recent poll where Trump's approval rating was around 40%,

52% of Americans approved of how he's handling trans issues.

Another poll showed that was more than approved of Trump's handling of immigration, far more than approved of his handling of tariffs.

And if you look more deeply into polling on trans rights, the public has swung right on virtually every policy policy you can poll.

Trump didn't just win the election.

He and the movement and ideology behind him have been winning the argument.

Sarah McBride is a freshman congresswoman from Delaware, where she was formerly a state senator.

She is the first openly trans member of Congress, and her view is that the trans rights movement and the left more broadly has to grapple with why their strategy failed, how they lost not only power, but hearts and minds, minds.

And what needs to be done differently to protect trans people and begin winning back the public starting right now.

I was struck talking to McBride how much she was offering a theory that goes far beyond trans rights.

What she's offering is a counter to the dominant political style that emerged as algorithmic social media collided with politics.

A style that is more about policing and pushing those who agree with you than it is about persuading those who don't.

Sarah McBride, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

So I want to begin with some polling.

So Pew asked the same set of questions in 2022 and 2025.

And what it found was this collapse in, I would call it persuasion.

So they polled the popularity of protecting trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing, public spaces.

That had lost eight points in those three years.

Requiring health insurance companies to cover gender transition lost five points.

Requiring trans people to use bathrooms that match their biological sex gained eight points.

When you hear those results, what to you happened there?

By every objective metric, support for trans rights is worse now than it was six or seven years ago.

And that's not isolated to just trans issues.

I think if you look across issues of gender right now, you have seen a regression, right?

Marriage equality support is actually lower now than it was a couple of years ago in a recent poll.

We also see a regression around support for whether women should have the same opportunities as men compared to 5, 10, 15 years ago.

And so there's a larger regression from a gender perspective that I think is impacting this regression on trans rights.

But I think it has been more acute, more significant in the trans rights space.

I think, just candidly, I think we lost the art of persuasion.

We lost the art of changemaking over the last couple of years.

We're not in this position because of trans people.

There was a very clear, well-coordinated, well-funded effort to demonize trans people, to

stake out positions on fertile ground for anti-trans politics and to have those be the battlegrounds rather than some of the areas where there's more public support.

We're not in this position because of the movement or the community, but clearly what we've been doing over the last several years has not been working to stave it off or continue the progress that we were making eight, nine, 10 years ago.

And I think a lot of it can be traced

to

a false sense of security.

that I think the LGBTQ movement and the progressive movement writ large began to feel in sort of the post-marriage world.

I think there was a sense of cultural momentum that was sort of this unending cresting wave.

I think there is this sense of sort of a cultural victory that

lulled us into a false sense of security.

And I think in many ways shut down needed conversations.

And I think, you know, the support that we saw for trans rights in 2016, 2017, it was sort of a mirage of support in some ways, because I think there was, in the post-marriage world, there was a transfer of support from the LGB to the T.

I think for two reasons.

One, I think people said, well, the T is part of the acronym.

So I support gay people, so I'll support trans people.

It's all the same movement.

But two, I think in those early days after marriage, a lot of people

regretted having been wrong on marriage in the 90s and in the 2000s.

And they went, you know, I didn't.

understand what it meant to be gay and therefore I didn't support marriage.

And I regret not supporting something because I didn't understand it.

So I'm going to, without understanding, support trans rights because I don't want to make that same mistake again.

And I think that resulted in a lot of us,

a lot of our movement

stopping the conversation and ceasing doing the hard work of opening hearts and changing minds and telling stories that over 20 years had shifted and deepened understanding on gay identities that allowed for marriage equality to be built on solid ground.

And I think that that allowed for the misinformation, the disinformation, that well-coordinated, well-funded campaign to really take advantage of that lack of understanding.

And the support on trans rights was sort of a house built on sand.

I want to connect two things you said there, because I'd...

I hadn't thought about this exactly before.

So you made this point that there's been a generalized gender regression, which is true.

And you also made this point that

people had this metaphor in their minds that I was wrong about gay marriage.

I didn't understand that experience.

So maybe I'm wrong here too.

But that one thing maybe that's different here

is

there's a sort of a set of narrow policies here, like non-discrimination, and then a broader cultural effort, right?

Everybody should put their pronouns in their bio or say them before they begin speaking at a meeting that was more about destabilizing the gender binary.

And there people had a much stronger view.

Like, I do know what it means.

I've been a man all my life.

I've been a woman all my life.

How dare you tell me how I have to talk about myself or refer to myself?

And that that made the metaphor break.

Because if the gay marriage fight was about what other people do, there was a dimension of this.

It was about what you do and how you should see yourself or your kids or your society.

Aaron Trevor Barrett, I think that that's an accurate reflection of sort sort of the overplaying of the hand in some ways that we,

as a sort of coalition, went to trans 201, trans 301 when people were still at a very much trans 101 stage one.

And then two, I think there were requests that people perceived as sort of cultural aggression, which then allowed the right to say, we're punishing trans people

because of their actions rather than we're going after innocent bystanders.

And I think some of the sort of cultural mores and norms that started to develop around inclusion of trans people were probably,

were probably premature for a lot of people.

We became absolutist, not just on trans rights, I think across the sort of progressive movement, we became absolutist.

And we forgot that in a democracy, we have to, one, grapple with where the public authentically is and actually engage with it.

And I think, you know, and part of this is fostered by social media, we sort of decided that

we now have to say and fight for and push for every single perfect policy and cultural norm right now, regardless of whether the public is ready.

And I think it misunderstands the role that politicians and frankly social movements have in maintaining proximity to public opinion, of walking people to a place.

We should be ahead of public opinion, but we have to be within arm's reach.

If we get too far out ahead, we lose our grip on public opinion and we can no longer bring it with us.

And I think a lot of the conversations around sports and also some of the sort of cultural changes that we saw in expected workplace behavior, et cetera.

was the byproduct of maybe just getting too far out ahead and not actually engaging in the art of social change making.

The position for more maximalist demands is one that you need to be in a hurry.

Trans people are dying now, suffering now,

and that there isn't time for decades of political organizing here.

And also that maybe it works, right?

Or maybe there's a reason to believe it works.

So you've been in more of those spaces than me.

How do you describe how this sort of more maximalist approach and culture evolved and why?

Well, first off, I think you're right.

It is understandable.

I mean, this is a scary moment.

I'm scared as a trans person.

I am scared.

And

I recognize that when the house is on fire, when there are attacks that are dangerous, very dangerous,

that

it can feel like

we need to scream and we need to sound the alarm and we need everyone to be doing exactly that.

I get that instinct.

I understand that people would say, if you give a little bit here, they'll they'll take a mile.

We're not negotiating with the other side, though.

In this moment, we have to negotiate with public opinion.

And we shouldn't treat the public like they're Republican politicians.

And when you recognize that distinction, I think it allows for

a pragmatic approach

that has the best, in my mind, the best possible chance of shifting public opinion opinion as quickly as possible.

It would be one thing

if

screaming about how dangerous this is right now had the effect of stopping these attacks.

But it won't.

You call it a sort of abandonment of persuasion, became true across a variety of issues for progressives, also for people on the right.

And sometimes I wonder how much that reflected the movement of politics to these very unusually designed platforms of speech, where what you do really is not talk to people you disagree with.

It's talk about people you disagree with, to people you agree with, and then see whether or not they agree with what you said.

And there's a way in which I think that breeds very different habits in the people who do it.

I think that that's absolutely right.

I mean, again, we're not in this place because of our community or our movement, but clearly we weren't, we aren't in this place because we weren't shaming people enough, because we weren't canceling people enough, because we weren't yelling at people enough, because we weren't denouncing anti-trans positions enough.

I think the dynamic with social media is that

the most outrageous, the most extreme, the most condemnatory content is what gets amplified the most.

It's what gets liked and retweeted the most.

And people mistake getting likes and retweets as a sign of effectiveness.

And those are two fundamentally different things.

And I think that whether it's subconscious or even conscious, rewarding of unproductive conversations has completely undermined the capacity for us as individuals or politically for us to have conversations that persuade, that open people's hearts and minds, that meet them where they are.

And I think the other dynamic that we have with social media is that there's sort of two kinds of people on social media.

The vast majority of people are doom scrollers.

They just go on and they scroll their social media.

20% maybe are doom posters, 10% on the far right, 10% on the far left.

The people who are so strident and angry that they're compelled to post.

And that content gets elevated.

But what that has resulted in for the 80% who are just doom scrollers is this false perception of reality.

Take a person, let's say they're center left, and it gives them a false perception of everyone on the left believes this

and

it pulls them that way.

And then it gives them a false perception that everyone on the right believes the most extreme version of the right.

And it creates this false binary extreme perception, the availability bias, because all of the content we're seeing is reflective of just the 20%.

And it's warped our perception of reality.

It's warped our perception of who people are and and where the public is.

One of the best things about being an elected official is that I have to break out of that social media echo chamber, that social media extreme world and interact with everyday people.

And you see, yeah, there are real disagreements, but that 80% of the doomed scrollers or the people who aren't even on social media are actually in a place where we can have a conversation with them.

When I ask this question, I don't just mean on trans issues, but you represent Delaware, which is a blue state, not Massachusetts blue, but blue.

If you took your sense

of

what Democrats want or what the country wants from your experiences on social media versus your sense from traveling around your state, how would they differ?

I think they would differ in two ways.

One, they would differ in the issues that we would focus on, right?

What you hear on social media is a preoccupation with sort of the most inflamed cultural war issues that you almost never hear when you're out talking to voters in any part of the state.

What you hear is

a understandable catastrophizing around democracy, which you don't hear nearly as much when you're out talking to voters.

What you hear when you're talking to voters is you hear about the cost of living.

You hear about the bread and butter issues that are keeping people up at night, people who aren't on social media or aren't posting on social media.

And so, you hear a difference in priorities, but then you also hear a difference in approach.

People are hungry for

an approach that doesn't treat our fellow citizens as enemies, but rather treats our fellow citizens as neighbors, even if we disagree with them.

An approach that's just

an approach that's filled with grace.

And I think on social media, we have

come to this conclusion, rightfully so, that people's grace has been abused in our society, that the grace of marginalized people, the patience of marginalized people has been abused.

And that is true.

But on social media, the course correction to that has been to eliminate all grace from our politics.

It's how dare you have conversations with people who disagree with you?

How dare you be willing to work with people who disagree with you?

How dare you compromise?

How dare you seek to find common ground with Republicans?

And I think when you go out into the real world, Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, there is a hunger for some level of grace, for us to just not be so angry at one another and miserable.

They want to see and know that we actually do have more in common.

And therefore, it gives you hope that persuasion is not only necessary, but can actually still be effective.

What does grace in politics mean to you?

And when have you either seen it or experienced it?

I think grace in politics means,

one, creating room for disagreement, assuming good intentions, assuming that the people who are on the other side of an issue from you aren't automatically hateful, horrible people.

I think it means creating some space for disagreement within your own coalition.

I think it's a kindness that just feels so missing from our body politic and our national dialogue.

And look, I saw it in the Delaware State Senate on both sides of the aisle, whether it's in Republicans in Delaware joining on to be co-sponsors on an LGBTQ panic defense bill that I was the prime sponsor of, whether it was the discourse being much kinder and more civil on a whole host of even cultural war issues, I saw that grace have the effect of lowering the temperature, removing some of the incentives to go after vulnerable people in this country, in our state.

I saw it with my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle who didn't vote

for

bills that were deeply personal to me, and yet we still found ways to work together.

We still found ways to develop friendships.

And look, I know that that places more of a burden on me than it does on them, right?

I know that when you're asking a marginalized person to extend grace in a conversation, you're asking much more of that marginalized person.

But change making isn't always easy and it's not always fair.

And why would we expect that the extra burdens and barriers of marginalization would cease at the point of overcoming the marginalization, of creating the change necessary to eliminate prejudice and create equal opportunity in our society?

No, that's where the barriers are going to be greatest.

That's where the burdens are going to be greatest.

It reminds me of a line that I feel, I hear it less now, but I used to see it a lot, which is,

it's not my job to educate you.

And I always thought about that line because on one one level, I understood it.

I mean, it's probably not your job to educate anyone.

And then, if you're in politics, if you're what you're trying to do is political change, I always found that line to be almost anti-political.

Yeah.

Right.

That

if what you want to do is change a law, change a society, change a heart, and you're the one who wants to do it.

Well, then whose job is it?

And who are you expecting to do it?

It's an understandable frustration,

but it's the only way forward.

And look,

I don't believe that every person from an underrepresented or unrepresented community needs to always bear the brunt and burden of public education, right?

Like, I don't believe that every LGBTQ person has to be out and sharing their story and doing all of that hard work.

But for the folks who are willing to do it,

we need to let them.

And one of the problems we've had is that we've gone from it's not my job as an individual person who's just trying to make it through the day to educate everyone to no one from that community should educate.

And frankly, we should just stop having this conversation because the fact that we are having this conversation at all

is hurtful and oppressive.

And maybe it is hurtful,

but

you can't foster social change if you don't have a conversation.

You can't change people if you exclude them.

And I will just say,

you can't have absolutism on the left or the right

without authoritarianism,

right?

The fact that we have real disagreements, the fact that we have difficult conversations, the fact that we have painful conversations is not a bug of democracy.

It's a feature of democracy.

And yes, that is hard and difficult.

But again,

how can we expect that the process of overcoming marginalization is going to be fair?

And I think the discourse has taken this understandable critique of society and the way we operate and the burdens we place on marginalized people.

And we've somehow said, well, the one place that we have control over whether we allow for that marginalization is in the strategies we use to overcome it.

And so we're...

we're not going to engage in that because it's sort of self-oppression.

And I think that is such a self-defeating and counterproductive approach.

I've been thinking in the past couple of months because

we are in the most illiberal era of my lifetime in American politics.

I don't mean liberalism in the sense of supporting or not supporting universal health care, but in terms of due process, in terms of tolerance, in terms of

the basic practice of politics and living amidst each other.

And it's also made me think about the need to clearly define what the practice of liberalism itself is.

What do you think it is?

I think it is the recognition that in a free society, we are going to live and think differently.

I think it is the allowance of that disagreement in the public square and the tussle of that disagreement in the public square.

And that is uncomfortable.

That is not easy.

And yes, there are going to be people in that conversation for whom it's going to be more difficult and more uncomfortable.

But

in the internet world, you can't

suppress

diversity of thought.

It will always bubble up, but it will bubble up if suppressed with an extra bitterness.

and an extremism fostered in that echo chamber that it's been suppressed to, it'll inevitably bubble up like a volcano.

And I think that's what we're seeing right now.

I will say, I think

while the left made this mistake of fostering an illiberalism based on a sort of false sense of cultural victory, I think now the right is making the exact same mistake.

I think they're overplaying their hand.

I think they're interpreting the 2024 election to be a cultural mandate that is much greater than what it actually is.

And I think that if they continue to do that, there will be a backlash to the illiberalism, the cultural illiberalism, not just the legal illiberalism, the cultural illiberalism of the right, in the same way that there's been a backlash to the cultural illiberalism of the left.

I couldn't, I think, agree with that more.

We're going to get to that.

I want to talk for a minute about the 2024 election in the aftermath.

So there's been a lot of rethinking and self-recrimination among Democrats.

One of the comments that got a lot of attention came right after the election when Seth Moulton, who is your colleague, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, said, quote, Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face.

I have two little girls.

I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.

But as a Democrat, I'm supposed to be afraid to say that.

What did you think when you heard that?

One, that it wasn't the language that I would use,

but I think it came from

a

larger

belief that the Democratic Party needed to start to have an open conversation

about our illiberalism, that we needed to recognize that we were talking to ourselves.

We were fighting fights that felt viscerally comforting to our own base or fighting fights in a way that felt viscerally comforting to our own base rather than maintaining proximity to the public and being normal normal people.

The sports conversation is a good one because I think,

you know,

there's a big difference between banning trans young people from extracurricular programs consistent with their gender identity and recognizing that there's room for nuance in this conversation.

And I think

the notion that we created this all-on or all-off mentality, that you had to be perfect on trans rights across the board, use exactly the right language.

And unless you do that, you're a bigot.

You're an enemy.

And when you create a binary all-on-or all-off option for people, you're going to have a lot of imperfect allies who are going to inevitably choose the all-off option.

And what ends up happening is the left excommunicates, will excommunicate someone who not only

Seth voted against the ban on trans athletes, but we would excommunicate someone who uses imperfect language.

Yes, look, again, not language I would use,

but we would excommunicate someone who's saying that there's nuance in this conversation and uses language that we don't approve of, yet still votes, quote, the right way, is exactly what's wrong with our approach.

And look, Seth's not going anywhere, but for a lot of everyday folks, If they think how Seth thinks, or if they think that there's room for nuance in this conversation and we tell them, you're a bigot, you're not welcomed here, you're not part of our coalition, we will not consider you an ally, the right's done a very good job of saying, listen, you have violated the illiberalism of the left, you have been cast aside for your common sense, welcome into our club.

And then human nature starts to be, once you then get welcomed into that club, human nature is, well, I was with the Democratic Party on 90% of things, maybe against them on 10% of things or sort of in the middle on 10%.

Once you get welcomed into that other club,

human psychologies, you start to adopt those positions.

And instead of being with us on 90% of things and against us on 10% of things, that person now welcomed into the far right club starts to be against us on 90% of things and with us on only 10% of things.

And I think that that dynamic is part of the regression that we have seen.

And not only the regression we've seen, but the hardening.

of the opposition that we've seen on trans issues.

We have been an exclusionary tent tent that is shedding imperfect allies, which is great.

We're going to have a really, really miserable, self-righteous, morally pure club in the gulag we've all been sent off to.

I think this goes to your point in a way.

So after he made those comments, the Times reported that a local party official and an ally had compared him to a Nazi cooperator.

There were protests outside his office.

I was always struck by which part of his comments got all that attention.

It was a part I just read to you, but he had also also said this.

Having reasonable restrictions for safety and competitive fairness in sports seems like, well, it's very empirically a majority opinion.

He's right on that.

But should we take civil rights away from trans people so they can just get fired for being who they are?

No.

He was expressing opposition to what was about to be Donald Trump's agenda.

Yeah.

And this space of his divergence from an already, an issue that had already been lost, you know, the polling was terrible on it.

That was where people on the left focused.

And his expression of

support

and

allyship,

as I saw, barely ever got reported or commented on.

It struck me as telling.

I think it absolutely is telling.

And I think it's

the best thing

for trans people in this moment is for all of us to wake up to the fact that we have to grapple with the world as it is, that we have to grapple with where public opinion is right now, and that we need all of the allies that we can get.

Because if you,

again, Seth voted

against the bans,

if we are going to defend

some of the basic fundamental rights of trans people,

we are going to need those individuals in our coalition.

If you have to be perfect on every trans rights issue for us to say you can be an ally and part of our coalition, then we're going to have a cap of about 30%

on our coalition.

If we are going to have 50% plus one, or frankly, more necessarily, 60% or more in support of non-discrimination protections for trans people, in support of our ability to get the health care that we need, by definition, it will have to include a portion of the 70% who oppose trans people's participation in sports.

And right now, the message from so many

is

you're not welcome.

And your support for 90%

of these policies is irrelevant.

The fact that you diverge on one thing makes you evil.

And it also misunderstands the history of civil rights in this country.

I mean,

you can't compromise on civil rights is a great tweet.

But tell me, which Civil Rights Act delivered all progress and all civil rights for people of color in this country?

The Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, or any of the civil rights acts that have been passed since the 1960s.

That movement was disciplined, it was strategic, it picked its battles, it picked its fights, and it compromised to move the ball forward.

And right now,

that compromise would be deemed unprincipled, weak, and throwing everyone under the bus.

And that is

so counterproductive.

It is so harmful.

And it completely betrays the lessons of every single social movement and civil rights movement in our country's history.

And we have an example of a very successful social movement in recent history with marriage equality.

Where would we have been in 2007 and 2008 if not only we had not tolerated the fact that Barack Obama was ostensibly not for marriage equality then, but if we had said to voters,

even if you vote against the marriage ban, but aren't quite comfortable with marriage yet, that you're a bigot and you don't belong in our coalition, where would that movement have been?

The most effective messengers were the people who had evolved themselves.

We had grace personified in that movement, and it worked beyond even the advocates' wildest expectations in terms of the speed of both legal progress and cultural progress.

Because we created incentives for people to grow, we created space for people to grow, and we allowed people into our tent, into that conversation who weren't already with us.

You mentioned the period in 2008 when Barack Obama was running for president.

And

at the very least, least, his public position, many of us suspected it was not his private position, but his public position, was that he opposed gay marriage.

That was the mainstream position at that point in the Democratic Party.

And there was a compromise position they all supported, which was civil unions.

Is there an analogy to the civil unions debate or position for you now?

I think on the sports conversation, it's local control.

It's allowing for individual athletic associations to make those individual determinations.

And in some cases, they'll have policies that strike a right balance.

In some cases, they'll have policies that are too restrictive.

And I think that that is the equivalent to the civil union's position in that debate.

By allowing for Democratic voters, independent voters, hell, even some elected officials to take that civil union's position, one

that met voters where they were.

It gave some of our politicians who needed it an off-ramp so that they didn't have to choose between being all-on or all-off.

And

it allowed that conversation to continue and prevented more harm from being inflicted.

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I want to pick up on the polling.

So there's this YouGov polling from January that looked at all these different issues.

And there are a lot of issues around trans rights that actually poll great.

So protection from trans people against hate crimes, plus 36 net approval.

Banning employers from firing trans people because of their identity, plus 33.

allowing transgender people to serve in the military, which Donald Trump is trying to rescind, plus 22.

Requiring all new public buildings to include gender-neutral bathrooms.

This surprised me, plus seven.

Then there's the other side.

Everybody knows that the sports issue is tough in the polling, but banning people under 18 from attending drag shows, that's popular.

Banning youth from accessing puberty blockers and hormones, that's very popular.

Banning public schools from teaching lessons on transgender issues, that's popular.

Requiring transgender people to use bathrooms that match their biological sex, that is popular.

When you look at these lists of issues, what do you see as dividing them?

What cuts the issues that you could win on now

from those that have heavy disapproval?

Well, I think that there's very clearly a distinction that the public makes between young people and adults.

I think that there is a distinction that is made in many cases when it comes to what people feel like is government support of or funding of versus

just allowing trans people to live their lives, lives, allowing trans troops who are qualified to continue to serve, allowing trans people who are doing great jobs in their workplace to continue to work.

It all goes back to this notion of get government out, let people live their lives and let families and individuals make the best decisions for themselves.

And I think that that should be the through line of our perspective, a libertarian approach to allowing trans people to live, live fully and freely, that there are some complicated questions, but that those questions shouldn't be answered by politicians who are trying to exploit those issues for political gain.

I was struck by your use of the word libertarian there.

Because when I look at this polling, what I see is something quite similar, which is

Americans by and large aren't cruel.

And

their view here is pretty live-in-let-live.

They have different views, which we can talk about in a minute, on minors.

But

where the question is the government coming in and bothering bothering you,

you being any trans person, they don't really want that.

What they don't want to do is change their lives or think something is changing for them in their society.

And maybe those two things are not in always possible, certainly over the long term.

But there are a lot of places where they are possible.

It seems to me that in 2024, and over the last couple of years, what Republicans did very well, their approach to persuasion was to pick the right wedge issues.

And you would think that the entire debate over trans policy in America was about NCAA swimmers.

Like this was the biggest problem facing trans people, the biggest problem in some ways facing the country, when it's a pretty edge case issue.

And questions like non-discrimination and access to health care are much more widespread.

But what they did was they used their wedge issue and they're now attacking those majority positions, right?

Trump is attacking discrimination, right?

He wants people discriminated against, he doesn't want trans people to be able to put the identity they hold and present as on their passports.

Not a huge winning issue for him.

And so, there's this question of picking the right wedge issues.

Is there a wedge issue for you that you wish Democrats would pick?

Well, listen, I think that we

do much better when we keep the main thing, the main thing.

Defending Medicaid in this moment is the main thing.

For everybody.

For everyone.

For everyone.

And look,

I think abortion to some degree had been

a wedge issue that was to the Democrats' advantage, not to the Republicans' advantage.

But I think we have to reorient the public's perception of what our priorities are as a party.

And I think when we lean into the cultural wars and lean into cultural wedge issues, even if they benefit us, they reinforce a perception that the Democratic Party is unconcerned with the economic needs of the American people.

When you ask a voter, what are the top five priorities of the Democratic Party?

What are the top five priorities of the Republican Party?

And what are the top five priorities for them as a voter?

Three out of the five issues that are the top issue for that voter appear in what their perception of the top five issues for the Republican Party.

Only one of their top five priorities appear in their perception of what are the top five priorities for the Democrats.

That's healthcare, and it was fifth out of five.

The top two were abortion and LGBTQ issues.

And I don't care what your position is on those two issues.

You are not going to win an election if voters think that those two issues are your top issues rather than their ability to get a good wage and good benefits, get a house, and live the American dream.

And I think we have to, to, in this moment, reinforce what is our actual priority as a party, which is making sure that everyone can pursue the American dream, which has become increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible, that everyone should be able to get the health care they need, be able to buy a home, be able to send their child to childcare without breaking the bank, if they can even get a spot.

That needs to be our focus.

And I think when we have these sort of purity politics approach to

LGBTQ issues or abortion, what we communicate, even if we're not talking about those issues, is we communicate those are threshold issues and therefore the voter reads that as those are priority issues.

And the only way to convince the voter that those are not our priority issues, that that's not what we're spending our capital and time on, but rather giving them health care and housing,

is to make it abundantly clear to people that our tent can include diversity of thought on those issues.

something that I notice in the broad coalition of groups and people and funders who identify as or support Democrats is that they all want the issue they care most about to be the issue that gets talked about the most.

People who fund anything from climate to trans rights

to all kinds of the hotter issues in American life.

You could actually imagine a strategy where those groups and that money went to making every election about Medicaid because Medicaid is just a killer issue for Democrats.

And then the people who get elected are better on those other issues too.

But it doesn't.

That money, those groups that are organizing, what they often want Democrats to do is publicly take unpopular positions on their issues.

I think all the time about the ACLU questionnaire that asked candidates, and in this case, Kamala Harris, whether she would support the government paying for gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants in prison.

Even if your whole position in life,

your point

is to make that possible, the last thing you would want is for anybody to claim it out in public, right?

You'd want nobody to ever think about that question ever at all.

And it's something I've heard Democrats talking about more after the election, just

rethinking on some level

this question of, is the point of all this organizing to get politicians to commit to the most maximalist version of your issue set?

Or is the point of this organizing to somehow figure out how to win Senate seats in Missouri and Kansas?

So you have

very, very, very moderate Democrats who nevertheless make Chuck Schumer the Senate majority leader rather than Jon Thune.

Right.

I think that there is an incentive from money and from social media, and those also go hand in hand sometimes with grassroots donations

that

incentivize

the groups

to want

to show

their influence and their effect by having politicians fight the fights that they want them to fight in ways that feel viscerally comforting to their own community that they're representing.

And look, I get that.

I understand that.

One, we have to be better as elected officials in saying no,

in saying public opinion is everything.

And if you want us to change,

you need to help foster the change in public opinion before you're asking these elected officials to betray the fact that they are, at the end of of the day, representatives that have to represent in some form or fashion the views of the people that they represent.

Like at some point,

you will represent the people's positions or they will find someone else who will.

And so it is just an unsustainable dynamic for the groups to continue to ask elected officials to take these maximalist positions, to ignore where their voters are.

They have to do the hard work of persuasion.

And there's always going to be a tension between the groups and elected officials.

Everyone has to do their own job, but there has to be some degree of understanding.

How do you hold that tension?

I always think this is such an interesting question for politicians to work with, because there is the internal and the external push to authenticity.

Yeah.

We don't want these poll-tested politicians.

Yeah.

And it's also your job to represent.

Yes.

On issues personal to you, on issues not as personal to you.

How do you think about balancing they elected you

versus you are their servant?

Yeah.

Look, all of these decisions inevitably require a balancing of my own views, my own principles, and the views of the people that I represent.

But I think one thing you always have to do is you have to go, okay, here's an issue that I feel very strongly about.

I vote against this.

What are the second, third, and fourth order consequences of voting against or voting in favor?

You might abstractly agree with something as an ideal, but if you were to pursue that or implement that policy, it would have, in the medium to long term, a regressive effect because there is a backlash to pushing too hard or taking too maximalist of a position by the mainstream in our politics.

One of the problems we've had is that we have said, not only you have to vote the way we want you to vote, but then you have to speak the way we want you to speak.

And I always have said, even when I was an advocate, if we can get the policy vote that we want and the compromise we are accepting is essentially a rhetorical compromise, that is a pretty darn good deal.

And again, I think we have to be willing to have these conversations out in the open.

We have to recognize that there's complexity, there's nuance, and that means not just in the policy space, but in the political space.

And that's authentic.

To say these are some really difficult conversations, and sometimes I'm going to get it right, and sometimes I'm going to get it wrong.

And sometimes I'm voting exclusively with what I think is the right thing to do, even if my voters disagree.

But also, sometimes I'm going to have to take a balanced view of this.

And that's democracy.

I want to pick up on speech.

It's true on trans and gender issues.

It's also true on a bunch of other issues in the past couple of years, that a huge number of the fights that ended up defining the issue were not about legislation, they were about speech.

I've always myself sort of thought this reflects social media, but I mean, the number of people who have talked to me about the term birthing persons, which I think virtually nobody has used,

or Latinx was a big one like this.

There is in general

this extreme weighting of can you

push changes of speech onto the people who agree with you and possibly onto society as a whole?

And that the strategy worked backwards from the speech outcome, not the legislative outcome.

How do you think about that weighting of speech versus votes?

I think,

look,

there is no question in my mind that the vote is much more important than the rhetoric that they use.

We have sort of discoursed our way into, like, if you talk about this issue in a way that's suboptimal from my perspective, you're actually laying the foundation for oppression and persecution.

And I just think like,

maybe academically that's true, but welcome to the real world.

Like,

we are prioritizing the wrong thing.

And it's an element of sort of virtue signaling.

Like I'm showing that I am the most radical, I'm the most progressive on this issue because I'm going to take this person who does everything right substantively and crucify this person for not being perfect in language.

It's a way of demonstrating that you're in the in-group, that you understand the language, that you understand the mores and the values of that group.

And it's a way of building capital and credibility with that in-group.

I think that's what it is.

And I just think it's like, it's inherently exclusionary.

And I think that that's part of the thing that's wrong with our politics right now, which is that all of our politics feels so exclusionary.

The coalition that wins the argument about who is most welcoming will be the coalition that wins our politics.

I think that's such an interesting point.

And I think probably true.

I'd also be curious for your thoughts on this.

I think there's a very interesting way that speech and its political power confuse people because it's two things at once.

It's extremely low cost and extremely high cost.

So pronouns, for instance, I think are correctly, it's a very, very easy thing.

And basically, if you won't use somebody's preferred pronouns, I think you're an asshole.

That's my personal view of it.

But

trying to execute a speech change where everybody lists their pronouns in their bio, where every meeting begins with people going around the circle and saying their name and their pronouns.

That feels very different to people.

It seems small, right?

I mean, you don't have to pay anything out of pocket, right?

You don't have to go anywhere.

And yet the language we use is very, very important to us.

Yeah.

I think you're absolutely right there.

And I think the thing with pronouns too is a prime example of where we've lost grace, though.

Me calling people assholes is not graceful.

No, no.

I think there is a difference between someone who's intentionally misgendering someone and some people who make mistakes.

And I think that there has been, whether warranted or not, the perception that people are going to be shamed if they make mistakes.

But then I think you're absolutely right too, that there is a distinction between treating me the way I want to be treated and everyone changing their behavior and sort of requiring this sort of,

again, in-group language

that exceeds just calling the person in front of you what they want to be called.

And I think it gets to something we were talking about earlier, which is a way, there are two pieces to the politics of this, and one is fairly popular, at least for now, and the other is a much tougher lift,

which is, I think, most people have that basic sense of politeness.

If you want to be referred to in a certain way, yes, I might slip up, but if I'm being a decent person, I'm going to try.

Yeah.

Versus

the move around pronouns to, you know, the move for calling, you know, know things cisgender

that was a much bigger effort that in some ways wasn't described as such and i feel like there's been a dimension of the politics here

where

things that were very academic arguments became political arguments

and then

people were a little bit unclear on what the political win would be to like destabilize the fundamental gender binary that people understand is operating is you know touching something very deep in society versus treating other people with respect

and courtesy and decency and grace

is a much easier sell.

And I think it's okay to want to do the former,

but I think people kept sort of mixing up which their actual project was.

At the end of the day,

the thing that we lost

is that we're just talking about people trying to live their lives, trying to live the the best lives they can.

We got into this rabbit hole of academic intellectual discourse that doesn't actually matter in people's lives.

We got into

this performative fighting to show

our bona fides to our own in-group.

And we lost the fundamental truth that all of those things

are only even possible once you've done the basic legwork of allowing people to see trans people as people.

When

you allow trans people to be seen as human beings who have the same hopes and dreams and fears as everyone else, once that basic conception of humanity exists, then all the other things, all the other conversations sort of fall into place.

Language inevitably changes across society, across cultures, across time, but it is a byproduct of cultural change.

And I just think we started to have what maybe were conversations that were happening in academic institutions or conversations that were happening in sort of in the community.

And we started having those out in public on social media and then demand that everyone else has that conversation with us and then incorporates what the dominant position is in that conversation and the way they live their lives.

And it's just like, that's not how this happens.

Let's just talk about human beings who want you to live by the golden rule.

Let's just talk about the fact that trans people are people who can be service members and doctors and lawyers and educators and elected officials and do a damn good job in that.

That is the gateway to everything else.

And it has always been in every social movement.

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The place where it is complicated and the place where not just the politics, but I think the answers are complicated, is around children.

And we talked about the NCAA swimmers and the edge case nature of that.

But schools are broader.

And a lot of what the Trump administration is doing, a lot of what you see Republicans are doing in states is around schools and and minors.

And

that's tougher.

Parents want to know what their kids are doing.

On the one hand, if you're a kid with gender dysphoria and taking puberty blockers early matters.

On the other hand, there are a lot of things parents don't let their kids do young because they're not sure what they're going to want in a couple of years.

How do you think about that set of issues?

The sort of leave them alone makes a lot of sense for adults, but we don't leave kids alone.

exist in a sort of paternalist system where their parents have power over them, their schools have power over them.

And so the question of policy there becomes very profound.

Yeah.

I think, first off,

I think

in that instance, we acknowledge the and rightfully acknowledge the important role that parents play in decisions for their children.

Look,

you can recognize that there's nuance here.

You can say that there need to be stronger standards of care, that maybe things got too lenient.

But ultimately, politicians aren't the people who should be making these decisions.

The family should be making these decisions.

The family in consultation with a doctor should be making these decisions.

And

I think that that is a fair balance in recognizing the need for every child to get medical care and also the right of parents to make decisions, including healthcare decisions for their children.

But you do see right now in some European countries, the government setting tighter standards.

There have definitely been a lot of arguments about whether or not the research was good, whether or not the research was ideologically influenced.

So there's some government role here, some role for professional associations, some context in which families and doctors make these decisions.

What is that role?

Well, I think you just hit on that distinction, which is that in many European countries, the distinction between the sort of healthcare system and the government is fuzzier.

In many cases, you have government-operated hospitals.

Here,

you have healthcare systems, you have standards of care developed by providers in those medical associations.

And that is where those decisions should be left up to in terms of establishing the standards of care.

And then, when applying those standards of care, allowing those

the application, the practical application of those standards of care to happen between patients, families, and providers, because it's fundamentally a different kind of system.

I think the critique, the fear of the right that I hear, that some of these same dynamics towards pushing out people who question the evidence, towards there being things you can say and things you cannot say, took hold,

and that the results of that can't be trusted.

That

everything you said is happening in politics is also happening in medicine and elsewhere.

I think that we actually started to see a pretty difficult but important conversation within WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, about the standards of care for youth care before government started intervening, where they started having a conversation about how to adjust the standards of care, recognizing perhaps that they needed to tighten them.

And that's true across healthcare.

I mean, standards of care across different forms of care are constantly evolving.

That conversation was starting to happen.

You cannot tell me that it's the role of the government to preempt those conversations.

Those conversations should not be

settled in legislative bodies by politicians who aren't looking at the data, don't understand the data, and certainly aren't objectively interpreting the data.

And look, I think all of this changes, though,

the conversation changes, I should say, when people understand

what it means to be trans.

Because I think right now we think of it as a choice.

We think of it as an intellectual decision, right?

Like, I want to be a girl, I want to be a boy, and I I want to do this because of these rewards, or I don't want to do it because of these risks.

That's not what gender identity is.

It is much more innate.

It is a visceral feeling.

It's not the same as whether you get a tattoo or what you have for dinner.

It's not a decision.

It's a fact about who you are.

And I think the challenge in the conversation around gender identity that differs from sexual orientation is that most people who are straight can understand what it feels like to love and to lust.

And so they're able to enter into conversations around sexual orientation with an analogous experience.

And the challenge in the conversation around gender identity is that people who aren't trans don't know what it feels like to have a gender identity that differs from your sex assigned at birth.

For me, the closest thing that I can compare it to was a constant feeling of homesickness.

just an unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that would only go away when I could be seen and affirmed as myself.

And I think that because we stopped having that conversation, because we stopped creating space for people to

ask questions, for people's understandable, perhaps invasive, but understandable curiosity to be met with an openness and a grace, not by everyone, but just the people who were willing to do it.

We stopped people having an understanding of what it means to be trans and it allowed them to start to see it or it allowed for their pre-existing perception that this is some sort of intellectual choice to manifest.

And in some cases, the perfect quote discourse started to reinforce that,

right?

That,

like, we started to get to this place where you couldn't be like, I'm born this way,

right?

That we policed the way even LGBTQ people or trans people talked about their own identities

to be this perfect sort of academic.

Why can't you say I'm born this way because it was

I'm not no no I'm not saying you're saying it but I this is a

there was sort of an academic perception of like every people have different

people should have agency over their sexual orientation and gender identity even if it's not quote innate

and that there was this sort of

acceptance of a sort of mainstream perception of sexual orientation and gender identity that was a one-size-fits-all narrative around LGBTQ people that didn't necessarily include people whose understanding was more fluid or their understanding evolved over time

or for whom they feel like they want to transgress gender norms because

of a reason that's not

this sort of innate sense of gender.

And I think when you take that

capacity for us to authentically talk about our experience away from us, because it's not sort of academically the purist that creates space and room for every single different lived experience within that umbrella,

you give people justification to say, or think this is a choice.

And if it's a choice, the threshold to allow for discrimination becomes lower.

I've known a number of people who've transitioned as adults, and

the degree to which most of us avoid doing anything that would cause us any social discomfort at all times is so profound.

How much we live our lives trying to not make anybody look at us for too long

that it's always struck me as

it must be such a profound need.

to make that decision to come to your family, to your wife or your husband, to your kids, to your parents.

And so, the sort of right-wing meme that emerged around it that people are transitioning because they opportunistically want to be in another bathroom

or another locker room

or get

some kind of cultural affirmative action

always struck me as

not just absurd, but deeply unempathic.

Like not thinking for a moment

what it must mean

to want that that much.

And so then it's interesting to hear you say that there was almost a pincer movement on that

because it hasn't struck me as a thing people, I mean, I'm sure there is agency and people make decisions here, but the pull from inside of everybody I've known is really profound.

Usually they've been trying to choose the other way for a long time and eventually just can't anymore.

That's That's exactly what my experience was.

You know, it's funny because sometimes there's discourse that like the only reason why I'm an elected official is because I'm trans.

Like I see on the right this notion that I'm, you know, a

diversity higher.

I was like, well,

voters chose me.

It's kind of an insult to voters that they didn't choose me because they think that I'm the best qualified or best candidate or reflective of what they want, but they just chose me because of my identity.

But it also just undersells such a larger truth, which is that my life would be so much easier if I wasn't trans.

Now, I'm proud of who I am.

I'm proud that this is my life experience for a whole host of reasons.

But this is all a lot harder because I'm trans.

Are there moments where I get a microphone or, or,

you know, am I sitting here, right?

If I was a non-trans freshman Democrat, would I be be sitting here?

Maybe not.

Maybe I would.

Maybe not.

We probably would be having a different conversation.

But

navigating this world as a trans person

has always been, and even more so now,

it's incredibly hard.

And all any of us are asking, or at least all that most of us are asking,

is to just let us live the best life we can, a life with as few regrets as possible, a life where we can be constructive, productive, contributing members of society.

You might not understand us.

It is hard to step into the shoes of someone who is trans and to understand what that might feel like.

But I spent 21 years of my life

praying

that this would go away.

And the only way that I was finally able to accept it was one, realizing this was never going to go away.

Two, becoming so consumed by it that it was the only thing I ever really was able to think about because the pain became too all-encompassing.

And three,

the only way I was able to come out was because

I was able to accept that I was losing any future.

I had to go through stages of grief.

And the only way I was able to come out was to finally get to that stage of acceptance over a loss of any future.

It's really scary and it's really hard.

And right now it is particularly scary and hard.

And

to your point earlier, most people are good people and they just want to treat other people with respect and kindness.

But unfortunately, in this moment in our politics,

We were recently at something where someone gave us some information and they said that when a voter was asked to describe the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, it was crazy for the Republican Party and preachy for the Democratic Party.

I think that that undersells something that's more

true,

which is that a voter will look and say,

the Republican Party are assholes to other people.

I don't like that, but the Democratic Party is an asshole to me.

And if I have to choose between the party that's an asshole to me because I'm not perfect, or a party that's an asshole to someone else, even if I don't like it, I'm going to choose the party that's an asshole to someone else.

When you entered Congress,

you were quite directly targeted by some of your Republican colleagues, led by Nancy Mace, on which bathrooms you could use, a thing that would not have happened if you were not a trans legislator.

And this is the majority party in the House, right?

You have to work with these people.

You're on committees with them.

What has your experience been like?

Both sort of absorbing that and then trying to work with people

who you know, may or may not have given you much grace in that moment.

Well, the first thing I'd say is that the folks who were

or are targeting me because of my gender identity in Congress, those are folks who at this point are really, not really working with any Democrats and can barely work with their own Republican colleagues.

I've introduced several bills.

Almost all have been bipartisan.

I've been developing relationships with colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

Part of my responsibility in this moment

is to show that when someone like me gets elected to public office, we can do the whole job.

And that means working with people who disagree with me, including on issues that are deeply personal.

The folks who are coming after me, I mean, look, it's been hard,

but I know,

I know

that they are coming after me

not because they are deeply passionate about bathroom policy.

They're coming after me because they are employing the strategies of reality TV.

And the best way to get attention in a body of 435 people is to throw wine in someone's face.

That gets you a little attention.

But if that person that you're throwing wine in their face, if they respond by throwing wine in your face, it creates a beef, which gets you a season-long story arc.

I knew that they were trying to bait me into a fight to get attention.

And I refused to be used as a political pawn.

I refused to give them not only the power of derailing me, but the incentive to continue to come after me.

And this was a prime example.

This was a prime example of how to fight smart that is demonized on our own side.

Because the grace that I didn't get wasn't just on the right, there was a lot of critique on the left.

And I understand when you're a first, people viscerally feel your highs and they also viscerally feel your lows.

But

what would me

fighting back in that moment have done?

It wouldn't have stopped the ban.

And it would only have incentivized further attacks and continued behavior like that.

And sometimes we have to understand

that not fighting,

not taking the bait, that's not a sign of weakness.

It's not unprincipled.

Discipline and strategy are signs of strength.

And

I think in the social media world, we have lulled ourselves into thinking the the only way to fight is to fight.

It's to scream and it's to yell and it's to do it on every instance.

And anytime you don't do it, you're normalizing the behavior that's coming your way,

which

is both a ridiculously unfair burden to place on every single human being to have to fight every single indignity.

But by that logic, the young black students who were walking into

a school that was being integrated in the late 50s and 60s, who were walking forward calmly and with dignity and grace into that school as people screamed slurs at them,

by that definition, that student was normalizing those slurs by not responding.

Instead, What that student was doing was providing the public with a very clear visual,

a very clear contrast between unhinged hatred and basic dignity and grace, which is fundamental to humanity.

And for me, one of the things that I struggled with after that was the lack of grace that I got from some in my own community who

said that I was reinforcing

the behavior of the people who were coming after me, that I was not responding appropriately to the bullying that I was facing.

When the reality is

that behavior has diminished significantly because I removed the incentive for them to continue to do it because the incentive was so blatantly about attention.

And I wasn't going to let them get the attention that they wanted.

You remind me of something I heard Barack Obama say many, many years ago when he was getting criticized for trying to negotiate, trying to reach out to people who by that point, many on the left thought he was naive for trying to work with.

And he said something like

that he had always felt that the American people could see better if the other side had clenched their fist, if he opened his hand.

I thought there was a lot of wisdom in that.

Yes.

Yes, absolutely.

Early on in those first few weeks, I had some folks text me as I was responding the way that I was, and they said, you should watch 42,

which is the movie about Jackie Robinson.

And I am not comparing my experience to Jackie Robinson at all, at all.

But there's a scene in that movie that's so

illustrative of these dynamics, which is he's meeting with the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers is trying to sort of provoke him into anger.

And when he sort of succeeds, the owner says to him, basically, you have to understand that when you are a first,

if you respond to a slur with a slur, they'll only hear yours.

If you respond to a punch with a punch, they'll say you're the aggressor.

If we go in and say to these folks, we're never going to work with you because you're never going to work with us,

then we get the blame for never working with them, not them.

If we go in and we respond to their hatred with vitriol and anger,

they're going to blame us.

And that's the reality of the double standard standard in our politics.

That's the reality that a first always has to navigate.

Let them

put their anger, their vitriol on full display.

Let us provide that contrast with our approach.

Look, it's not going to always work out and it's not always going to create the outcome that you desire,

but

people need us to demonstrate that contrast to them for them to truly see it.

I've been having a conversation in a very different context context than this, but I'm curious to hear your answer to it.

I've been having this conversation about whether or not good politics always requires clear enemies.

Do you believe it does?

No.

I believe that you can tell a compelling story.

with an enemy.

There's no question of it.

It sometimes is an easy out in our politics.

But

I think that there's something to be said about a politics that is rooted in opposition to an enemy

that is fundamentally regressive,

that anger is fundamentally conservative in its political outcome.

Barack Obama

and Bill Clinton, for that matter, did a good job of putting putting forward an aspirational politics that wasn't defined by who we are against, but by what we are for and about who we can be.

And I think that that is a more successful path for progressive politics than an enemies-based politics, which so often devolves to anger, which I think more often than not facilitates in the medium and long term a regressive politics.

Look, I'm not saying it can't always be effective politics, but that you can have effective politics and good politics and better outcomes with an aspirational politics, with a politics that isn't just about what it's opposed to, but about what it can build and about who we can be.

Because I think everyone has sort of this own internal struggle between their own better selves and their better angels and their base instincts.

Much earlier in the conversation, I'd asked you about liberalism, which was a little bit of a weird question to drop in there.

And I don't really have a question here.

It's just something I'm thinking about, but you actually strike me as one of the most liberal as a temperament,

liberal in the classical sense, politicians I've talked to in a long time.

And I've been starting to read a lot of older books about liberalism because it feels to me that it is a thing, an approach to politics that even liberals lost.

And one of the reasons I think we lost it, I very much count myself as a liberal,

was a feeling that liberalism's virtue was its vice, that its

openness to critique, its constant balancing,

its

movement towards incremental solutions, and its skepticism of total solutions, that those had been these conditions

under which problems never truly got solved.

Systemic racism and bigotry festered.

And

I think as it began to absorb that critique,

it lost a lot of confidence in itself.

And in a way, it had had Barack Obama, who was like the apex of the liberal leaders, and he hadn't brought about utopia.

And so it seemed exhausted.

And I think alongside that, There's some way in which I cannot,

I still need to figure this out,

but I'll say it because I believe it's true.

I think there's something about the social media platforms.

It is illiberal as a medium.

We now have X and we have Blue Sky and we have Threads, and none of them are good.

They all lead to bad habits of mind

because simplifying your thoughts down to these little bumper stickers and then having other people who agree with you retweet them or mob you doesn't lend itself to the pluralistic balancing modes of thought that liberalism is built to prize.

They're illiberal in a fundamental way.

And so I don't think it's an accident that as liberalism began to lose its own moorings, illiberalism roared back.

And just one experience I've had of this whole period with Donald Trump, the second term,

is realizing that the thing that we were trying to keep locked in the basement was really dangerous.

Yeah.

Really, really profoundly dangerous.

Even compared to his first term, I mean, the attacks on due process, the trying to break institutions, that if you let that out,

if you let the disappearance machine get started, that things can go really badly.

And

there's something about liberalism that is so unsatisfying.

I mean, the work you just described having to do,

it sounds so unsatisfying and frustrating.

And yet,

I guess just that.

And yet.

And yet it is

the approach

and the system

that while imperfect

is the most likely and most proven to actually lead to the progress that I and I know so many others seek.

Look, people have one life.

And it is completely understandable that a person would feel,

I have have one life.

And when you ask me to wait, you are asking me to watch my one life pass by without the respect and fairness that I deserve.

And that is too much to ask of anyone.

And that is.

It is our job to demand now in the face of people who say never.

But it's also our job

to then

not reject the possibility for a better tomorrow as that compromise.

I truly believe

that liberalism,

that our ability to have conversations across disagreement,

that our ability to recognize that in a pluralistic, diverse democracy, there will be inevitably people and positions that hurt us.

But when you're siloed and when you suppress that opposition underground in that basement to use your word

they're alone in there

And not only does that sense of sort of

community loneliness breed bitterness,

but it also breeds radicalization.

Liberalism is not only the best mechanism

to

move forward,

but it is also the best mechanism to rein in the worst excesses of your opposition.

Yes, the compromises, you don't get to do everything you want to do.

But that is a much better bet

than the alternative, which is what we have developed now, which is an illiberal democracy in so many ways in our body politic.

One where, yes, we might have temporary victories.

But as we are seeing right now, those victories can be fleeting

and the consequences can be deadly.

Was this always your political temperament or was it

I have grown and changed.

You know, there are things that I did and said 5, 10, 15 years ago that I look back and regret because I think that they were too illiberal, because I think I bought into a culture online that didn't always bring out the best in me.

But I do think that those were exceptions.

And even when I was an advocate, I was always perceived as one of the more mainstream respectability advocates.

I was always considered someone who was too willing to work across disagreement and engage in conversations that we shouldn't be having.

I was always considered someone who was too willing to work within the system.

And so I think I've fundamentally always had this same perspective and fundamentally.

have always believed

that we cannot eliminate grace from our politics and our change making.

And that's rooted in watching my parents grow and change after I came out.

Like, I went into that experience knowing my parents were going to, like,

they are progressive people.

They embraced my older brother who's gay without skipping a beat.

But I knew when I shared that I was trans with them, it was going to be devastating, to use a word that my mother uses.

And I knew that if I responded by shutting down the conversation,

by refusing to walk with them, by refusing to give them grace and assume good intentions when they would inevitably say and do things that might be hurtful to me, I would stunt their capacity to take that walk with me.

And I saw us as a family move forward with a degree of grace toward each other, that we were all going to inevitably say and do things that.

we would come to regret, that might hurt a little bit, but that if we assumed good intentions and walked forward, that my parents would go from saying, what are the chances that I have a gay son and a trans child

from a place of pity to a place of awe and the diversity of our family and the blessings that have come with that diversity.

And that only came from grace.

And then I saw it working in Delaware passing non-discrimination protections.

I've seen it time and time again.

And so I have borne witness.

to change that once seemed so impossible to me as a kid that it was almost incomprehensible, not only become possible, but become a reality in large part

because of grace in our politics.

And yes, because I was willing to extend that grace to others.

Grace, blessings, witness, are these for you religious concepts?

They tap into

my religion.

I'm Presbyterian.

I'm an ordained elder in the Presbyterian church.

But I think they go to something for me that transcends religion and my faith and tap into just my my sense of beauty toward the world and my sense of beauty at life and the joy that I get to live this life, that I get to be myself and that I get to live a life of purpose.

And I know I'm lucky in that respect and

I want everyone to have that same opportunity.

But, and

I have seen that approach

and that grace.

It's allowed me to be a better version of myself, a happier version of myself, which I think has actually unlocked those opportunities.

That's interesting.

Is it a practice?

When you say that it's allowed you to be a better version of yourself,

it's a podcast where everything is ultimately self-help.

Is that something that intentionally you

cultivate?

And if so, how?

Yes, i think it's

it's often an intentional choice

so many of the problems that we face are rooted in the fact that hurt people hurt people

and i think we are in this place where we are in this fierce competition for pain

where the left says to the right what do you know about pain

white straight cis man my pain is real as a queer transgender person and then the right says to the left what do you know about pain, college-educated, cosmopolitan elite?

My pain is real in a post-industrial community ravaged by the opioid crisis.

And we are in this competition for pain when there is plenty of pain to go around.

And

every therapist will tell you that the first step to healing is to have your pain seen and validated.

And while it requires intentionality and effort sometimes, I think we would all be better off if we recognized

that we don't have to believe that someone is right for what they're facing to be wrong.

And

I also think that there's one other aspect of this that I think we have lost, which is the intentionality of hope.

We have fallen prey

in our online discourse, in our politics,

to

a sense that cynicism is in vogue, that cynicism cynicism

shows

that we get it.

And I think one of the things that we have to recognize

is

sometimes hope is a conscious effort.

And that that sense of inevitability, that sort of organic sense of hope that we felt in this post-1960s world, that is the exception in our history.

And you have to step into the shoes of people

in the 1950s, people in the 1930s, people in the 1850s,

and to move past the history that we view with the hindsight of inevitability and go into those moments and recognize

that every previous generation of Americans had every reason to give up hope.

And you cannot tell me that the reasons for hopelessness now are greater than the reasons for hopelessness then.

So you're saying there's something audacious

about hope.

There is something audacious.

There's audacity in it.

You have to summon it.

You have to summon it.

And I think if we allow ourselves to recognize that hope isn't about optimism is about circumstance.

It's about evaluating likelihood.

Hope is something that transcends that.

And when we allow ourselves, when we loll ourselves into the sense of cynicism and we give up on hope, that is when we lose.

My editor has this habit of these very delphic sayings that I have to then think about for a while afterwards.

And a week ago, he said to me that cynicism is always stupidity.

And in the conversation we were having, I didn't ask him about it.

But I think, and he's not here to tell me I'm wrong, that what he meant is cynicism is the posture

that we both know what is happening and we know what is going to happen,

that we've seen through the performance

into the real

grimy,

pathetic backstage.

And we know it's rigged.

We know it's plotted and planned.

And so it's this posture, this knowing posture of idiocy.

I think it's that and it's just, it's easy.

It's easy.

I think that's the place to end.

Always our final question.

What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

So

to this conversation, I think one of the best books on political leadership and understanding how to foster public opinion change is Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns-Goodwin.

It's one of my favorite books.

Two,

I've been reading over time, it's not new, These Truths by Joe Lapora, one volume, History of the United States, which helps to reinforce that so many of

the challenges and dynamics that we face in this moment are actually not unique, even if the specifics are, how cyclical our challenges are and our history is.

And then the final one that I'm actually rereading, I read it in the first term of Trump, is the final days, the sequel to All the President's Men.

And you realize reading that how often it felt like Nixon was going to get away with everything, that he'd stay in office and it'd be be fine for him, and how many instances that it appeared to be done and that he had won until August 9th, 1974 happened and he resigned.

And I think for me, it's a helpful reminder that it often

seems impossible until it's inevitable.

Congresswoman Sarah McBride, thank you very much.

Thank you.

This episode of the Azure Clown Show is produced by Annie Galvin.

Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, our senior engineer is Jeff Gelb.

Mixing by Isaac Jones with Amin Sahota.

Our executive producer is Claire Gordon.

The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Koble, Kristen Lin, Lin, and Jack McCordick.

Original music by Pat McCusker.

Audience Roger by Christina Samielwski and Shannon Busta.

The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Any Ross Rasser.

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