LAUREN BOYD
Staff Reporter
Sarah McBride’s favorite dessert is crème brûlée. Her favorite place to travel is Europe, and her favorite TV show is “Ted Lasso.” She is a dog person, although she says her family dog, Scout, is “not very well-behaved.”
Like many women in their 30s, she is a massive Swiftie and has recently favored “Wildest Dreams” and “Lavender Haze.” After self-proclaiming as “such a nerd,” she says “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” is “the best book on leadership [she’s] ever read.”
McBride graduated from American University in 2013, where she was student body president, a role that translated well into her current position as a state senator for Delaware’s First District.
Her favorite thing to do in the morning is to go back to sleep, but says the most important thing for her to do is to drink a cup of coffee, an internal struggle that most of us can relate to.
But McBride has faced another struggle far beyond the decision to choose sleep or caffeination, one that lies in her identity as a transgender woman. Now, 12 years after coming out, she is running to be Delaware’s only representative in the United States House of Representatives.
Senator McBride was elected in 2020 as a Delaware senator for the First Senate District and has since been reelected in 2022. As a state senator, McBride sponsored Senate Bill 1, also known as the Healthy Delaware Families Act, which was later passed in April 2022.
SB1 is a paid family and medical leave insurance program, which allows Delaware workers to “access up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave to care for themselves or a family member with a serious illness, to bond with a new child, or for a family member’s military deployment,” according to ACLU Delaware.
“Passing that legislation … with bipartisan majorities thus far in my life is the professional privilege of my career,” McBride says. “[This] is life-changing and life-saving for so many people on a scale that leaves me awe-inspired.”
McBride spent her childhood dreaming of working on the type of legislation that she now spearheads.
“It wasn’t necessarily that I wanted to run for office, I just always felt like politics was the place where every avenue of society converges, and you can make the most amount of change in the most number of ways possible,” McBride says of her adolescence. “And that always appealed to me.”
Growing up in politically connected Delaware, as a child, McBride engaged with her political idols because, in many ways, they were like neighbors. In her 2019 memoir, “Tomorrow Will Be Different,” McBride reminisced on the first time she met incumbent President Joe Biden, who she described as “Delaware’s hometown kid who made it big.”
In a local pizza place, “He kneeled down, ripped out his schedule for the day from his briefing book, and pulled out a pen. ‘Remember me when you are president,’ he wrote, followed by his signature,” McBride wrote.
McBride also says that Delaware’s political connectedness impacted the discovery of her identity as a transgender woman.
“I think in some ways … it made [coming out] easier,” McBride wrote. “My friends and family, and my mentors, like Jack Markell and Beau Biden were, are decent people, good people, accepting people.
“I didn’t lose a single friend coming out. And that makes me lucky, but I always feared that coming out would let them all down.”
Coming out was long-awaited for McBride. In “Tomorrow Will Be Different,” McBride detailed her first memories about her gender and the dysphoria she experienced. She reminisced on playdates as a five- or six-year-old, where she savored dressing up as a Disney princess.
“My favorite was a shiny blue Cinderella dress,” McBride wrote. “Putting it on and looking down, I felt the longing go away. A completeness instantly came over me, and a dull pain that I didn’t fully understand was gone.”
As McBride grew older, she says that the struggle around her gender grew with her. But simultaneously, her political aspirations flourished.
While still a teen, McBride began working with then-gubernatorial candidate Jack Markell, a mentorship that continued long after the former governor’s time in office. She also campaigned for Beau Biden’s run for Delaware Attorney General, where she further forged connections in the political sphere. All the while, an internal tension ran rampant.
“Being me appeared so impossible that changing the world seemed like the more realistic bet,” McBride wrote in her memoir. “And the thought of doing both at the same time was, in a word, incomprehensible.”
McBride continued pursuing a political career at American University as student body president, where she championed LGBTQ rights. But in her junior year of college, the inner turmoil that surrounded her gender, and her everyday life, became too much to ignore.
On April 30, 2012, the final day of her term as student body president, McBride published a statement called “The Real Me” on Facebook and in American University’s student newspaper.
Leading up to her public coming out, McBride says she “went through sort of a grieving process.”
“Only when I was able to accept the fear and the potential that I was giving up on any future, was I able to finally accept myself,” McBride says. “I gave up on any future in politics or government.”
Looking back, this sentiment could not have been further from the truth. In fact, as a state senator, McBride has broken what once seemed like an indestructible glass ceiling. She is the highest-ranked openly transgender elected official in U.S. history.
“One of the joys of the last 12 years since coming out has been in seeing that my dreams and my identity aren’t mutually exclusive,” McBride says.
McBride’s entire professional career has been record-breaking. In 2012, she became the first out transgender woman to serve in the White House when she interned for the Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs under the Obama Administration. In 2016, McBride became the first out transgender person to give a speech at a major party convention after she spoke at the Democratic National Convention.
Until she was elected in 2020, McBride was the national spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ political advocacy and lobbying group in the U.S.
In June 2023, McBride launched her campaign to be Delaware’s next representative in the U.S. House of Representatives, where she believes her identity as an out transgender woman will be an asset.
“I think in many ways it’s only possible for me to do the work that I’m doing, and to do it well, because I’m out,” McBride says. “Because I’m living authentically, I’m a healthier version of myself, and I think I’m a better version of myself.
“If I had not had the blessing of being born trans, I wouldn’t have had a life that has left me just fundamentally and eternally hopeful.”
And it is that hope, McBride says, that will allow for progress.
To harness it, McBride says she often finds reprieve from the stress of the future by taking a moment to look back.
“The challenges that we’re facing are no greater than the challenges that previous generations faced,” McBride says. “In every single one of those chapters in our history books, previous generations had every single reason to fear that change would never come. It came because they summoned their own hope, they found the light and they changed the world.
“I have to believe that if previous generations have done it, then we can do it too.”
Part of harnessing that hope, McBride says, is acting as strong allies, especially when it comes to interacting with people who hold opposing views. She believes that it is important for allies to stay in those conversations and help educate and hold people accountable.
“When we as allies remove ourselves from those conversations, we’re actually letting ourselves off easy,” McBride says, including herself in the discussion as well.
Her work as a state senator has already highlighted this kind of advocacy, and McBride hopes to do the same as a Delaware representative. She hopes to continue the work she started with SB1 and support American families who need it most.
“In the wealthiest, most developed nation on Earth, there should be no person without healthcare,” McBride says. “There should be no family who is forced to choose between their financial security and their health. There should be no one without paid leave. There should be no family who struggles to afford child care.”