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The Ezra Klein Show

Sarah McBride on Why the Left Lost on Trans Rights

June 17, 2025

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[19]Ezra Klein

By [20]Ezra Klein

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transcript
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transcript

How to Beat Back Trump on Trans Rights — and Much Else

Representative Sarah McBride reckons with the trans rights movement’s
shortcomings, and how to win hearts and minds through a politics of grace.

    Donald Trump, in his inauguration speech, was perfectly clear about what he
    intended to do. [CLIP] “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 of the federal
    government had, and some that it may not have. [CLIP] President Trump has
    signed an executive order which declares the US government will no longer
    recognize the concept of gender identity. [CLIP] President Trump, directing
    the Secretary of Education to create a plan to cut funding for schools that
    teach what he calls gender ideology. [CLIP] This afternoon, President Trump
    makes a move to ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.
    [CLIP] Ban on gender-affirming care for transgender kids. [CLIP] A ban on
    gender-affirming care for transgender inmates in federal prisons. [CLIP] A
    ban on transgender troops serving in the military. [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 the stories of impact.
    [CLIP] It’s a complete dehumanization of transgender people. It’s about
    privacy and dignity. For me to be able to change my passport to male,
    [CLIP] It’s going to come along with having to out myself to border patrol
    agents. [CLIP] We are begging to be allowed to continue our service and
    you’re just going to wash us away. 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. And if you
    look more deeply into polling on trans rights, the public has swung right
    on virtually every policy you can poll. Banning trans medical care for
    minors? That’s a majority issue now. A few years ago, it wasn’t. 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. [CLIP] We have
    to grapple with the reality of where people are beyond this room or this
    city or my state. Meeting people where they are is not selling out. It’s
    what this work is. 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. 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 8 points in
    those three years requiring health insurance companies to cover gender
    transition, lost 5 points requiring trans people to use bathrooms that
    match their biological sex gained 8 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. Marriage equality support is
    actually lower now than it was a couple of years ago in a recent poll. We
    also see a regression on 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 change making 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 8, 9, 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 the post-marriage world. I
    think there was a sense of cultural momentum that was this unending
    cresting wave. I think there is this sense of a cultural victory that led
    us into a false sense of security, and I think in many ways shut down,
    needed conversations. And I think we the support that we saw for trans
    rights in 2016, 2017. It was 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 tea. I think for two reasons. One, I think people said,
    well, the tea 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 2000. And they went 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 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 a house built on sand. I want to connect to
    things you said there, because 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 set of narrow policies here
    non-discrimination and then a broader cultural effort. Everybody should put
    their pronouns in their bio or say them before they begin speaking out at a
    meeting. It was more about destabilizing the gender binary. And there
    people had a much stronger view. 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 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. I think that that’s an accurate
    reflection of the overplaying of the hand in some ways that as a coalition,
    went to trans 201, trans 301 when people were still at very much trans 101
    stage one and then two, I think there was. There were requests that people
    perceived as 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 cultural mores and norms
    that started to develop around inclusion of trans people were probably
    premature for a lot of people. We became absolutists, not just on trans
    rights. I think across the 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 we and part of
    this is fostered by social media. We 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 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 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. Or
    maybe there’s a reason to believe it works. So you’ve been in more of those
    spaces in May. How would you describe how this more maximalist approach in
    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 it, I understand
    that people would say, if you give a little bit here, 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, and 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 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 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, two 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 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 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 percent maybe are doom posters 10 percent on the far
    right, 10 percent on the far left, the people who are so, so strident and
    angry that they’re compelled to post and that content gets elevated. But
    what that has resulted in for the 80 percent 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 of availability bias.
    Because all of the content we’re seeing is reflective of just the 20
    percent and it’s warped our perception of reality. It’s warped our
    perception of who people are 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 percent of the doom 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. What you hear on social media is a preoccupation with the most
    inflamed culture 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
    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 culture 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
    place is more of a burden on me than it does on them. 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 ceasefire 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 level I understood it.
    I mean, it’s probably not your job to educate anyone. And then if you’re in
    politics, if 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. 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, 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. We’re not going
    to engage in that because it’s 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. And I 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 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 illiberal
    liberalism of the right, in the same way that there’s been a backlash to
    the cultural liberalism 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’s your
    colleague, 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 people. I think the sports conversation is a good one because I
    think there is. 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. The 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 percent of things,
    maybe against them on 10 percent of things, or in the middle on 10 percent
    once you get welcomed into that other club, human psychology, you start to
    adopt those positions. And instead of being with us on 90 percent of things
    and against us on 10 percent of things, that person now. Welcomed into the
    far right club starts to be against us on 90 percent of things and with us
    on only 10 percent of things. And I think 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 that is shedding in perfect 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
    collaborator. There were protests outside his office. I was always struck
    by which part of his comments got all that attention. It was the part I
    just read to you. But he 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. That was the polling was
    terrible on it. That was where people on the left focused. And his
    expression of support and allyship, as I saw it, 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 in 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 percent on our coalition. If we are going
    to have percent plus 1, or frankly, more necessarily 60 percent or more in
    support of nondiscrimination 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 percent who oppose trans people’s
    participation in sports. And right now, the message from so many is you
    don’t you’re not welcome. You and your support for 90 percent 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 if you’re not comfortable, 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 had
    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 advocate’s 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, 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 is the equivalent to the Civil unions
    position in that debate by allowing for Democratic voters, independent
    voters, hell, even some elected officials to take that civil unions
    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 on 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. Yes 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, 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
    should be through line of our perspective. A libertarian approach to
    allowing trans people to 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 and let live.
    Yes, 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
    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 all ways
    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 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
    nondiscrimination 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. Trump is attacking discrimination. 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. It’s 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 culture wars and lean into culture war 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 health. 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 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 child care without breaking the bank if they
    can even get a spot. That needs to be our focus, and I think when we have
    this 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’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 is, your point is to make that possible. The last thing you would want
    is for anybody to claim it out in public. You would 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 John Thune. 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 and
    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 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 can be 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
    know she’s personal to you on issues not as personal to you. How do you
    think about balancing. They elected you versus 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, O.K, 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’s 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, 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
    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 discoursed our way into,
    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 maybe academically that’s true, but welcome
    to the real world. Like, we are prioritizing the wrong thing. It’s an
    element of virtue signaling. Like I’m showing. 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 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 having 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. I mean, you don’t have to pay anything out of pocket. 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, it’s not graceful. Well, no. No, I
    think there is a difference between someone who’s intentionally
    misgendering someone. So 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 requiring this, 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 that there are two pieces to the politics of
    this. 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 the move for calling, things cisgender. That
    was a much bigger effort than 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 political what the political win would be
    to destabilize the fundamental gender binary that people understand is
    operating is touching something very deep in society versus treating other
    people with respect and courtesy and decency and grace. Yeah is a much is a
    much easier sell. And I think it’s O.K to want to do the former. But I
    think people kept 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 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, 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 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, in 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, 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 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 leave them alone makes a lot of
    sense for adults, but we don’t leave kids alone. Kids exist in a
    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, 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 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 health care 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 health care system and the government is fuzzier in many cases.
    You have government operated hospitals here. You have health care 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 that 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 health. 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, I 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 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 intellectual choice to
    manifest. And in some cases, the perfect quote discourse started to
    reinforce that. See how that we started to get to this place where you
    couldn’t be like, I’m born this way that we policed the way even LGBTQ
    people or trans people talked about their own identities to be this perfect
    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 AI think there was been
    aware of there was an academic perception of like people have different
    people should have agency over their sexual orientation and gender
    identity, even if it’s not innate, and that there was this acceptance of a
    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 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 academically the purest 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 it’s always the degree to which most of us avoid doing anything that
    would cause us any social discomfort at all times is so found 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. 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 this the right wing meme that emerged around
    it that people are transitioning because they opportunistically want to be
    in another bathroom. Yeah or another locker room or get some kind of
    cultural affirmative action. Always struck me as not just absurd, but
    deeply unempathic not thinking for a moment what it must mean to want that
    much. And so then it’s interesting to hear you say that there was almost
    like 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 exactly what my experience was. I
    mean, it’s funny because sometimes there’s discourse that I 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 a diversity hire. I was like, well, voters, 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 the 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 am I sitting here. If I was a non-trans freshman Democrat,
    would I 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 an 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 3, 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 I think 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 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. You have to work with these
    people. You’re on committees with them. What has your experience been like.
    Both absorbing that and then trying to work with people who 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 likes me 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, that’s been hard, but I know that they’re 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 refuse to give them not only the power of
    derailing me, but the incentive to continue to come after me. And this is I
    think 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, it 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 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 any
    time 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 in to 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 I think 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 that 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, 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, absolutely. I 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, I think illustrative of these
    dynamics, which is he’s meeting with the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers and
    the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Says it’s trying to provoke him into
    anger. And when he succeeds, the owner says to him, basically 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 in our politics. That’s the
    reality that a first always has to navigate. Let them. 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 us, for them to truly see it. I’ve
    been having a conversation in a very different 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. 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 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 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 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. 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. Yeah 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 that
    is illiberal as a medium. I think the reason that 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, then having other people who agree with you, retweet them
    or mob you is just. It 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 is, 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
    the 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 something, 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 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 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 forged. I have grown and changed. I think
    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 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. I
    think I fundamentally always had the 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. Look, I went into that experience knowing my parents were
    going to look. 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 intentions and walk 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 in 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
    nondiscrimination protections. I’ve seen it time and time again. And so I
    just 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 her. Or 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 faith and tap into just my sense of beauty toward the world and my
    beauty 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. 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. Is it a practice, when you
    say that it’s allowed you to be a better version of yourself. It’s a
    podcast, so everything is ultimately self-help. Is that something that
    intentionally you cultivate, and if so, how. Yes, I think 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 not to go
    down a rabbit hole. I think that 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.
    But I also think that there’s one other aspect of this that I think we have
    lost, which is the intentionality of hope. And I think. We have fallen prey
    in our online discourse and our politics, to a sense that cynicism is in
    vogue, that 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
    sense of inevitability, that 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 audacity in it. There is. 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 lull 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 that it always
    includes a 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 also 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 would 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 Jill Lepore, a 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 all 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 fine for him.
    And how many instances that it appeared to be done and that he had won
    until August 9, 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.

Video player loading
Representative Sarah McBride reckons with the trans rights movement’s
shortcomings, and how to win hearts and minds through a politics of grace.
CreditCredit...The New York Times

How to Beat Back Trump on Trans Rights — and Much Else

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 [25]
NYT Audio App, [26]Apple, [27]Spotify, [28]Amazon Music, [29]YouTube, [30]
iHeartRadio or [31]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
have 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.

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