CHAPTER 3

“Sarah.”

A few months before coming out publicly, I had applied for a White House internship, a six-month, full-time role within the building I had worshipped my entire life. Ever since I was nine or ten years old, I had always dreamed of interning there, imagining myself walking the halls and entering the building every day for work.

I had hoped to apply for the fall semester during my senior year—the first semester following my term as student body president—but when I came out to my parents and began to quietly transition, I thought about holding off.

I knew that this White House had been supportive of LGBTQ equality, but as far as I knew, there had never been anyone like me, an openly transgender woman, in any White House position. The thought of rejection so soon after coming out frightened me, and I wanted to protect myself. Thousands of people apply for a White House internship each semester. Being accepted is a crapshoot for anyone, but if it didn’t happen, I’d always worry, Was it because I’m transgender? Did they think I’d be a liability? Or, worse, an embarrassment?

In the end, the years of unbridled excitement I’d had since I was younger won out. I didn’t want to pass up the potential opportunity to work for this president and vice president and be a part of their historic administration.

Given that the White House internship required a security background check, I had to submit the application under my legal name, which was still my birth name. The application also included a box for a preferred name or a nickname. Most applicants write in a shorter version of their legal name, or maybe make clear that they go by their middle name instead. I put down “Sarah.”

Sarah. It felt good to finally write my name in an official capacity, let alone an application to work at the White House. It was the first formal document to reflect the name I had adopted only a few months before.

Names are important. Not just in the transgender community but everywhere. It’s the first thing a parent gives to a baby. It’s how our society bestows personhood, recognizes individuality, and affirms the humanity in each one of us. That’s why one of the first steps in marginalizing someone is to remove their name. It communicates that you are unimportant and unseen. When governments seek to oppress, they often replace names with impersonal numbers. When an individual seeks to bully or commit violence, they replace names with dehumanizing slurs or insults.

For transgender people, our names, along with our pronouns, are often the first way we express our gender identity and the most common way for society to recognize it.

There is often a curiosity about the names given to us at birth. This is a deeply personal piece of information for many of us. It may seem odd that many transgender people deem such information so sensitive. People who change their last name, for instance, don’t usually bristle at the question “What was your name before?”

Not every trans person is uncomfortable with saying or hearing their birth name. For many of us, though, we are reluctant to give out that information because it often becomes weaponized against us, invoked instead of our chosen name to ignore and deny our gender identity.

And even for the most well-intentioned cisgender people, when they see my old pictures or find out my birth name, I can see the wheels turning in their heads as they reconstruct an image of me, seeing me not in the present but in the past.

Every trans person’s path to their own name is different. Some have just always known. Others pick a name that may share a first letter with their birth name. I know plenty of trans people whose parents helped them pick their name, and not just people who transitioned young, but also individuals who came out in their forties or fifties.

For me, like many expecting parents, I just looked at lists of names.

I can’t pick that one because I know someone with that name and they were an asshole, I’d think as I skimmed the baby names. Finally, I narrowed it down to a few, and chatting with Helen, I settled on Sarah. Yes, it might seem like a pretty generic name to some, but for me it just felt like it fit. Every Sarah I knew was smart and funny and exuded a type of casual femininity that I identified with.

I picked the name the night before I came out to my parents. I wanted everything to be as firm as possible, since I knew they’d latch onto any sense of uncertainty. It all had to feel real to them, and having a name made it real.

During the five months between coming out to my parents and coming out publicly, my friends did an amazing job of calling me “McBride” in public and “Sarah” in private. They also took the initiative, with my permission, to cover up my old name on a student government campaign poster hanging in my campus office, replacing it with “Sarah McBride for SG President.”

Writing my name on that White House application felt good. But given that the name on the application effectively outed me—and I wanted to make sure they understood what the White House was getting—I also made clear in my application essays that I am transgender, information that I tried to seamlessly work into my answers, given that one of my primary motivations for wanting to be a part of the Obama administration was to contribute to its work on LGBTQ rights.

Helen had actually interned at the White House a year before in the Office of Public Engagement (OPE), a division that grew out of what had been called the Office of the Public Liaison. Ever the community organizer, President Obama expanded the small office tasked with dealing with stakeholder groups to roughly thirty staffers, with point people working with the African American community, women, Latinos, unions, small businesses, the disability community, and the LGBTQ movement, among others. While Helen’s background was in gender-equity advocacy, she had been assigned to the staffer heading up LGBTQ outreach. She had an amazing experience and recommended that I list the Office of Public Engagement as my first choice on the application. So I did.

Two months after coming out, I received the news I had been hoping and waiting for: I had been accepted into the program, and in late August 2012, I prepared to walk into the White House for my first day.

In August 2012, trans equality had not yet significantly entered the national public debate like it would in the years that followed. During their first term, the Obama administration had taken several important but lower-profile steps on trans rights.

For instance, as the largest single employer in the United States, the president had instructed federal agencies and departments to begin adopting gender identity–inclusive equal employment policies. Such a development was a far cry from the days when people suspected of being LGBTQ were rooted out of their jobs in the executive branch. In fact, up until the Clinton administration, LGBTQ people were routinely denied security clearances simply because of who they were.

Perhaps the most significant action taken by 2012 had been by Secretary Hillary Clinton’s Department of State, when they adopted new policies for changing the gender marker on U.S. passports, allowing people to do so even if they hadn’t had gender affirmation surgery. To many, this may seem like a small, technical advancement, but in reality the change was the first major nationwide reform on behalf of transgender people ever.

According to a 2011 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, only 21 percent of transgender people who had transitioned had been able to update all of their identity documents to reflect their gender identity. A full third—33 percent—lacked any identity document representing their true gender.

IDs are among our most utilized documents. They are required to travel, enroll in school, obtain a job, open a bank account, and, increasingly and unfortunately, vote. There are legitimate arguments that gender is not even necessary on these documents, but so long as drivers’ licenses, passports, birth certificates, and other IDs include gender markers, it remains critical for them to reflect the gender identity of the person carrying them.

Allowing transgender people to update those documents makes a profound statement that we are respected and acknowledged as who we are. They make clear how the person should be treated. Perhaps more important, identification provides a vital layer of security and protection for us. IDs that still reflect a transgender person’s sex assigned at birth can out the carrier, exposing them to discrimination, harassment, and, potentially, violence. Imagine having to reveal a deeply personal piece of information that could put you in danger every single time you fly on a plane, go to a bar, or use your credit card.

Prior to the change, the State Department required that individuals undergo gender affirmation surgery in order to update their gender marker. This, unfortunately, was a common, misguided, and burdensome policy that effectively put a $20,000 (or more) charge on accurate identity documents. And that’s just for those who plan on having gender affirmation surgery. Many in the community never do, because they feel like they do not need it, they can’t undergo surgery for medical reasons, or they can’t afford it.

So the change was a major step. Even if other forms of identification were still outdated, the updated passports provided many transgender people across the country with a usable document not just when traveling but when signing up for loans or applying for a job.

Despite the weight of the change for the community, it received little notice by the national media. And the uniqueness of the advancement underscored an early cautiousness on the part of the Obama administration on the issue of trans rights, a fact that likely reflected both the current political environment and a lack of familiarity with transgender people and our lives.

In anticipation of my time at the White House, I moved quickly to legally change my name and update my driver’s license, including my gender marker. Everyone who works in the White House is issued a security badge that includes the person’s legal name in big letters. The badge must be visible at all times, and I didn’t want to walk around with my old name staring everyone in the face.

For the first three months after stepping into the world as myself, before I started at the White House, I had to utilize my old driver’s license, with my old name, an old picture, and a big fat M on it. I’d avoid situations where a license was necessary, and in the few instances when I used it, my heart would race as I’d hand my license to whoever was requesting it.

“Is this a joke?” one server asked me after I handed her my driver’s license while out to dinner with a friend.

Stopped for a traffic violation, a male police officer clearly felt uncomfortable interacting with me after I handed him my old driver’s license.

“Umm. Ummm,” he fumbled after looking down at my picture. “Hold on a second.” He walked back to his car, and a female officer, who felt more comfortable talking with me, exchanged places with him.

“Just change your name,” many cisgender adults would tell me. But it wasn’t that easy. While many people change their name following a marriage or after a divorce, the policies for a name change outside of those contexts usually differ significantly.

Each state has slightly different rules, but in Delaware, to change my name I had to schedule a court appearance and, prior to that, post the name change in two newspapers around the state. The policies are vestiges of a pre-Internet age and seek to avoid fraud or debt avoidance. The requirements take time and, most of all, cost money. Notices in the newspapers cost a few hundred dollars. Fortunately, my parents helped with the costs, and after a few weeks of notices in two Delaware papers, I went before a judge in Wilmington, Delaware, to have my name legally changed by order of the court.

I was nervous but ecstatic for the formal name change to come. I wanted to update my ID, a perpetual asterisk on my identity. But it was deeper than that. Just as each person’s love and support lifted my spirits and being seen as myself made me feel whole, the legal name change would be a clear declaration that my government sees and affirms me.

At the courthouse, most people were changing their names to nicknames they had gone by their entire lives. As the proceedings went on, it was clear I was the only person changing a name to transition.

The bailiff finally called my name and I walked slowly up to the lectern in the middle of the room right in front of the judge.

“I see you are here to change your name for the purpose of a gender transition,” the judge, a young Italian woman with short dark hair, read through the glasses perched on her nose.

I could feel the fifty eyes of the audience staring at me.

“Yes, Your Honor,” I sheepishly responded.

The judge looked up, began to smile, and responded, “I’m honored to be a part of such an important day for you. Congratulations. So ordered.”

I turned around to head to my seat next to my mom. As I walked back into the public section of the courtroom, I kept my head down, trying to avoid eye contact until I saw a hand jut out in front of me. It was an older man offering me a celebratory handshake. Another woman leaned over and, with a big smile on her face, clapped her hands quietly. And as the hearing ended and we exited the courtroom, several other attendees came up to shake my hand and congratulate me on this step.

It was a refreshing experience, despite how nerve-racking it was. Much like Governor Markell, the judge had modeled the right response for that courtroom. I was grateful to have had such a positive experience. To this day, many transgender people face extra legal barriers to updating their names. Individual judges hostile to trans identities have been known to deny requests for a name change outright, even when they have no legal foundation for doing so.

“I will not change a name from an obvious female name to an obvious male name and vice versa,” a judge told a trans man in Georgia.

“The DNA code shows God meant for them to stay male and female,” another judge in Oklahoma told a trans woman seeking a name change.

I thanked my lucky stars that my judge was so supportive. And with my name change now finalized, I put together the forms to change the gender on my license, which required a letter from a health professional effectively verifying my trans identity. With just two weeks to spare before the start of my internship at the White House, I received my updated driver’s license.

I couldn’t stop looking at it once I had it in my hands.

“Sarah Elizabeth McBride,” it read. “F.”

With the new ID in tow, I made my way to the White House for my first day.

The West Wing has become synonymous with the White House staff. And while the president and the most senior advisers work in the cramped extension attached to the west end of the White House, the vast majority of the staffers and all the interns are housed in a large building across an alley from the West Wing. Still within the White House grounds, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, or EEOB in D.C. lingo, looks like a giant gray wedding cake with columns on top of columns.

Built just after the Civil War, the building served for eight decades as the headquarters for the Department of State, as well as the Departments of War and the Navy before they were merged into the Department of Defense. It’s a divisive building; half of my friends think it is the most beautiful structure in D.C., while others side with Mark Twain, who called it the “ugliest building in America.” Whatever you think, it’s an imposing structure, and far grander than the more exclusive West Wing.

In my black dress and blazer, I entered the first security checkpoint and handed the Secret Service my new ID. They cleared me to go through, and after walking through double doors into a small corridor lined with large pictures of President Obama and Vice President Biden, I handed my ID over at a second checkpoint.

The Secret Service agent looked at my license and, handing me a temporary badge, pointed me through the doors and said, “Welcome to the White House, Ms. McBride.”

Welcome to the White House, Ms. McBride.