Representative Sarah McBride reckons with the trans rights movement’s shortcomings and how to win hearts and minds through a politics of grace.
This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
President Trump, in his inauguration speech, was perfectly clear about what he intended to do.
Archived clip of President Trump: 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 began an all-out effort to roll back trans rights, using every power the federal government had and some that it may not have.
Archived clip: President Trump has signed an executive order which declares the U.S. government will no longer recognize the concept of gender identity.
Archived clip: President Trump directing the Secretary of Education to create a plan to cut funding for schools that teach what he calls gender ideology.
Archived clip: This afternoon, Trump makes a move to ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.
Archived clip: Ban on gender-affirming care for transgender kids.
Archived clip: Ban on gender-affirming care for transgender inmates in federal prisons.
Archived clip: Ban on transgender troops serving in the military.
Archived clip: These executive orders, many of them have not actually gone into effect yet, but when I look across the country, we’re already hearing stories of impact.
Archived clip: 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 OK.
Archived clip: 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 male.
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 percent, 52 percent 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 you can poll.
Trump didn’t just win the election. He and the movement and ideology behind him had been winning the argument.
Sarah McBride is a freshman congresswoman from Delaware, where she was formerly a state senator. She’s the first openly trans member of Congress, and her view is that the trans rights movement and the left more broadly have to grapple with why their strategy failed — how they lost not only power but hearts and 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, by 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.
