CHAPTER 5

The political is personal.

“Why doesn’t Andy join us?” my dad piped in, clearly excited about his own idea.

In just a week, our family was scheduled to fly to Barbados for a family trip. My dad had rented a house on the southern Caribbean island with close friends and their family. Unfortunately, the other family backed out due to a work-related conflict.

Sitting around a table at a restaurant in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, my parents and I brainstormed people to join us and to help fill the house, which was now twice as large as what was needed.

“I’m serious. What about Andy?”

Bringing Andy on the family trip had crossed my mind. Both my parents had come to love him since that first visit to our house in Delaware a few months earlier. They were both as excited about my budding relationship with Andy as I was. Since finishing up my semester internship at the White House, Andy and I had been spending more and more time with each other. The kindness I saw on that first date proved to be as real as his brilliance. When he was working, we were texting or chatting over GChat. When he wasn’t working and I wasn’t in class finishing up my final semester of college, we were together.

I was spending an increasing number of nights at Andy’s apartment, located in a large, art-deco building at the top of a hill in the center of Washington. His apartment was an eclectic mix of mature adult and immature kid, with his law books displayed on a shelf right next to the toy robots he had collected throughout his childhood. Andy’s place felt like a home, filled with pictures, knickknacks, framed artwork, and toys for Andy’s two black-and-white cats, Flapjack and Waffles. After four years of sparsely furnished and cold college student apartments, Andy’s one-bedroom was a welcome and warm escape from campus.

We’d sit on his big, L-shaped brown couch and indulge in our favorite pastime: eating. Fortunately for both of us, Andy was an exceptional cook. On his nights, he’d orchestrate a delicious, elaborate meal with sides and restaurant-quality protein. Flavorful roasted chicken? Check. Perfectly cooked salmon? Check.

On my nights, I’d whip out store-bought taco mix or spaghetti. Ever the kind soul, Andy would eat those meals as if the greatest chef had made them. And each night was like a date night. We’d dim the lights, light some candles, and eat our delicious—or not-so-delicious—home-cooked dinners.

Even though Andy was working a traditional full-time job as an advocate at the Center for American Progress, he’d operate on my college-student schedule, staying up late with me to watch movies and, perhaps most commonly, enjoy our mutual addiction to terrible reality television. We’d talk into the early hours of the morning about events, policy, and the law, and explore issues of philosophy and morality.

He’d challenge me to be a better person. He’d encourage me to fight for equality in a way that respected every person’s dignity, to abide by certain unbreakable “first principles.” When a conversation about outing anti-equality politicians who are secretly LGBTQ themselves came up, he pushed back when I initially sided with the arguments that we should expose those politicians’ hypocrisy.

“There are certain lines we should not cross,” he told me. “Yes, hypocrisy is bad, but if exposing that hypocrisy requires us to commit an even greater evil, then we shouldn’t do it. We should challenge people on their ideas. We won’t bring others to our side by harming people, even hypocrites. It may feel satisfying, it may even be in pursuit of the good of revealing hypocrisy, but it violates a first principle.”

I still pushed back. “But these people are harming so many others with their policies.”

“What if you outed someone and they committed suicide because of it?” he shot back. “That’s not an impossible outcome. Is revealing hypocrisy worth someone potentially losing their life? Are you willing to bear the responsibility for that outcome? Is that one person’s hypocrisy really worth, potentially, their life?”

He was right.

Principles are worth something only if you stick by them even when they feel inconvenient. It’s easy to rationalize and find seemingly altruistic reasons for betraying a moral imperative, but that’s exactly when our principles are most important. We shouldn’t try to build a world in which every person has individual agency over their own gender or sexual orientation by utilizing tactics that remove or undermine that right. If your ultimate goal isn’t an unbreakable principle, then what is?

I was in awe of Andy. His insights repeatedly blew my mind. As someone still in college and four years Andy’s junior, the more I got to know him, the more I was amazed that he was interested in me. But that was the thing about Andy; he’d routinely make clear that he felt the same way about my feelings for him.

We both felt lucky to be with each other, a feeling that only intensified as we discovered, slowly but surely, our shared, cringeworthy affinity for baby talk and nicknames.

At some point in his life, Andy had started calling his bed a “beanpod.” And given the fact that neither of us were morning people, we began referring to each other as “beans stuck in the beanpod.” Soon enough, he became “big bean” to my “little bean,” partly a reflection of our age difference, but more so an ironic commentary on the pervasive gender stereotypes that told us that we should be insecure about the fact that I was taller than him.

By the time of our family trip to Barbados, Andy and I were inseparable, either physically together or constantly communicating. So when my dad suggested that I invite Andy, I jumped at the idea. I immediately stepped out of the restaurant and called him.

“Bean, I know this is ridiculous, but would you want to come with me and my family to Barbados in a week?”

“Uh, are you kidding me?!” he responded. I could tell he was giddy at the invite. Fortunately, Andy had flexibility when it came to getting off work for a week on such short notice. He also worked so hard that he was likely long overdue for a vacation. “Let me just rework some meetings, but I am so in.”

His friends later told me that the moment he got off the phone with me, he went into hyperdrive, buying new clothes and bathing suits ahead of the last-minute trip with my family.

Together, we flew to Barbados a few days later. Andy, already close with my mom, seamlessly ingrained himself with my family. As two attorneys by training, my dad and Andy listened to the recordings of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8, by the pool.

Andy and I routinely cooked breakfast for everyone, serving eggs, bacon, and toast on a beautiful patio table surrounded by a lush green yard and towering palm trees. We rented Jet Skis with my brother and skied the open ocean, me in the driver’s seat and Andy holding on to me for dear life as I dangerously flew over small cresting waves. I could tell he was terrified.

On our second-to-last day in Barbados, Andy and I took the family rental car to the north shore of the island. The day before, my parents had visited the northern end of the island, a sparsely populated area with large cliffs overlooking the ocean, and recommended the sight.

The drive, they warned us, was an overwhelming forty-minute journey, first through a crowded marketplace with narrow streets and then along a winding road. To make matters more confusing, drivers in Barbados drive on the left side of the road but still use cars built for driving on the right side. It’s like dropping an American-made car onto the streets of London.

Andy looked at me, frightened at the prospect.

“Uh, Bean, I don’t know if I can drive. That sounds horrifying,” he blurted out.

I smiled and hopped in the driver’s seat, then guided our car through the narrow streets of Speightstown’s busy marketplace. The tiny streets were packed; passersby surrounded our slowly moving car as traffic drove by in the opposite direction, with each car missing the passenger-side mirror by a mere inch or two.

“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! I’m going to hit something or someone!” I screamed the entire way.

Eventually, we made it through the town, completed the winding, forested second leg of the trip, and came to a dead end. We were pretty sure we had taken a wrong turn on our way to the main tourist spot along the cliffs, but after seeing the water through some bushes with the sun about to set, we decided to cut our losses and check it out.

We parked the car and Andy grabbed a bag from the backseat and followed me toward the water. I made my way through the bushes and, sure enough, found myself standing atop the towering cliffs lining the northern shore of the island, two hundred feet above the ocean.

The sun was setting to our left, filling the sky with bright orange and yellow hues and almost repainting the brown cliffs into a soft gold. The peacefulness of the scene, completely devoid of people, was interrupted only by the crash of the waves on the cliffs directly below.

As I turned around, I saw Andy setting down a blanket and pulling out food for a surprise picnic. Sitting on the blanket facing the setting sun, Andy and I took in the beauty of the scene.

“It’s breathtaking,” I said, looking out toward the ocean.

Andy didn’t respond.

“Isn’t it, Bean?” I turned toward him, but he was already looking at me. Our eyes met and he took a deep breath. “Can I say ‘I love you’?”

It had been almost eight months since our first date and four months into our more serious relationship. We were spending nearly every day together, but we hadn’t yet said “I love you.”

“Yes, of course you can.”

“I love you,” he said with a warm smile.

“I love you, too,” I responded, and kissed him.

I had known this moment was coming. As a society, we often get so consumed by the gender identity of transgender people that we forget that behind these national debates on trans rights, behind the newspaper stories and policy papers, are real people. Real people who love and laugh, hope and cry, fear and dream—just like everyone else.

When I came out, I never anticipated the possibility of falling in love with another transgender person. It wasn’t that I thought about the potential and dismissed it; the possibility honestly never occurred to me. I grew up so isolated in my own trans identity that I always imagined my life as the only transgender person in my community—a permanent solitary existence. Not devoid of friends or family, just absent anyone else like me. And while two transgender people falling in love is not uncommon in the trans community, it’s certainly the exception, at least in my experience.

Our shared identities had connected us, but our connection was so much deeper. We brought out the best in each other—a mutual undying belief that change is possible. If our interests didn’t always overlap, they almost always complemented one another. And underlying everything was our drive to push equality forward.

When we returned from Barbados, I began slowly moving more and more of my clothes and personal items into Andy’s apartment. My signed Obama campaign poster was placed just under his Hillary-decaled skateboard on the wall. Some of his toy robots had to make way for my Delaware knickknacks. We talked about our future together. I told him I eventually wanted to move back to Delaware, and we talked about how he would be able to continue to work in D.C. or find something in Philadelphia, just a thirty-minute drive from my hometown of Wilmington. At the time, I was also preparing to graduate from American University. And with graduation on the horizon, I started exploring moving home.

My love for Delaware is boundless. I’m known as the ultimate “statriot,” a word my friends made up as a mix between “state” and “patriot.” When anyone asks me where I’m from, I always respond, “The greatest state in the union, Delaware.”

Washington was exciting, but the pace was exhausting. The slower life and the smallness of Delaware were always more attractive to me. It is a state of neighbors, and the closeness of its people allows for a civically engaged person to have an outsized opportunity to effect change. More than anything else, though, Delaware was my happy place. It was a short drive from D.C. and, at least for the time being, Andy. My family was there. My friends were there. Delaware, for me, has always been home.

But as I prepared to graduate, I was faced with a decision that no one should have to make. It’s a decision that is all too common for LGBTQ people: the choice between living in a place we love or being safe and secure. Delaware law, which lacked nondiscrimination protections based on gender identity, wouldn’t allow me and other transgender people to have both. When I returned to Delaware from school on the weekends, it was still legal to deny me service at a restaurant simply because I was transgender. If I moved back after college, I could still be denied a job—or fired from one—because of my gender identity.

Most transgender people in Delaware live with this threat of discrimination every day and don’t have a choice in the matter, lacking the means to move or, understandably, unwilling to leave their family and connections. This everyday threat of discrimination was not a reality exclusive to Delaware. A majority of states, and even the federal government, still lack clear and explicit protections from discrimination for LGBTQ people. While an overwhelming majority of Americans presume that all forms of discrimination against LGBTQ people are permanently and clearly illegal, the reality is surprising and, sadly, far bleaker. And despite our historic progress, in most places in this country, LGBTQ people are still at risk of being fired from their jobs, denied housing, or kicked out of a restaurant or store simply because of who they are.

The promise that we will be judged on our merits at work and ensured equal access to basic necessities no matter our identity is a sacred covenant upheld and defended by our government. It is the foundation for any person to pursue the American Dream, and as I had learned as a little kid reading history books, each generation has been defined by whether or not they opened the doors of equality, opportunity, and prosperity for people long unseen and forgotten.

During the last century, our local, state, and federal governments have, often too slowly, sought to remove barriers and expand opportunity for communities once excluded. It’s the fight that led suffragettes to picket the White House for the right to vote and, later, for women in the 1970s to expand educational opportunities through laws such as Title IX. It’s the cause that propelled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and hundreds of thousands of Black Americans and allies to march on Washington, leading a movement that included the passage of the centerpiece of America’s nondiscrimination laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And it’s the legacy that allowed a Republican president, George H. W. Bush, to stand on the south lawn of the White House to sign the Americans with Disabilities Act and call for those “shameful walls of exclusion [to] finally come tumbling down.”

These protections exist through a series of sometimes complementary and other times overlapping city, state, and federal laws. The most famous of these statutes, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banned certain forms of discrimination in employment, some public spaces, and federal funding.

While most of these laws typically include protections on the basis of characteristics such as race, religion, disability, national origin, and sex, most states and the federal government still do not explicitly include sexual orientation and gender identity in them.

Unlike in Delaware, I was protected when I was at college in Washington, D.C. The District of Columbia had passed clear protections from discrimination for transgender people a decade before. Delaware had passed a nondiscrimination bill for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people in 2009, making it the last state to pass protections for one part of the LGBTQ community while leaving other parts—transgender people—out. Since then, the larger movement has listened to trans voices and rightfully come to the conclusion that it is wrong to leave any part behind, particularly the identities and segments of the community most vulnerable to discrimination or violence.

I wanted nothing more than to go home to Delaware. The possibility of coming back to live, work, and potentially start a family with someone I loved had seemed like such a long shot. But in the past year everything—from the response of my family and community, to my time at the White House, to my budding relationship with an incredible partner—demonstrated that one of the biggest barriers to change was my own misguided belief that certain things were impossible. That something was too hard. That people weren’t ready.

And so I resolved to help change Delaware law to make it inclusive of the needs of transgender people across the state. I joined the board of directors of Equality Delaware, a volunteer role. Equality Delaware, the state’s primary LGBTQ advocacy organization, had started a few years earlier, and since its founding, Delaware had passed sexual orientation nondiscrimination protections in 2009 and laws permitting civil unions, a precursor to marriage equality, in 2011.

The group was led by two attorneys, Lisa Goodman and Mark Purpura. Mark, a tall, bearded openly gay man, had come out four years before and dove headfirst into LGBTQ advocacy.

Lisa, who sported short brown hair with a streak of gray, had been involved in advocacy for a bit longer and was a master at legislative strategy. Lisa is one half of a Delaware political power couple. Her wife, Drew, had been executive director of the Delaware chapter of the ACLU and would later go on to serve as Governor Jack Markell’s chief of staff during the last year of his term.

With Delaware having passed sexual orientation nondiscrimination protections and laws permitting civil unions in 2009 and 2011, Equality Delaware now set out to close the circle and pass both marriage equality and gender identity protections in 2013. It was a lofty goal. Other states had attempted to do the same—to pass both a marriage equality bill and a nondiscrimination bill in the same year—but none had succeeded. In each instance, elected officials had come back to activists: We’re doing only one of these issues this year. Two is too many.

“The same will happen to you” was the message from other state and national advocates. “They’re going to push marriage because it’s higher-profile and you’ll end up with nothing.”

“I won’t let that happen,” I told the older, more experienced activists who warned me.

Honestly, no one thought we would succeed, save maybe for Mark, Lisa, and me. The gender identity bill alone was an uphill battle, but doing it within a month of the marriage bill would be next to impossible. There was a reason it had never been done before. “Good luck with that” was the nearly universal dismissive reaction from political observers in and out of the state.

Despite my confident assertions, I was unsure if I could fulfill the promises I made to other transgender people that we’d pass the bill. I was twenty-two years old and new to LGBTQ advocacy. Any hope would rest on building relationships with legislators and my current one with the governor. And so I began to work with Equality Delaware and other transgender people to lay the foundation.

A few months earlier, during the summer of 2012, right after coming out publicly as transgender, I met up with Jack Markell. He was in Washington for a college tour with his son, Michael, when he texted me out of the blue.

“Hey, Sarah. Any chance you are free tomorrow to show Michael and me around American University’s campus?”

While he had called me every two weeks after I first told him my news, this would be the first time we interacted in person since I transitioned. It was always nerve-racking “meeting” someone for the first time as me. Inevitably, there’d be some awkwardness, something I just had to force myself to break through.

I met Jack and Michael in the middle of the open green quad at the center of AU’s campus. Jack greeted me with a huge hug and we began to make our way around campus, but as I tried to show him around, he kept interrupting my tour to ask me questions about gender and trans identities. I could tell Jack was taking me in, and knowing that Michael was unlikely to actually attend AU, I welcomed the opportunity to educate him.

“You still want to come back to Delaware, right?” Jack asked me, aware that I had always wanted to move back.

I thought about my answer for a second. “I do, but I’m honestly nervous to come home. I can’t come back to a state that doesn’t protect transgender people from discrimination.”

I told him about the pervasive discrimination and the culture of violence that many, particularly trans women of color, fear every day due to the not-so-random toxic mix of transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, and racism in this country. Delaware needed to join the growing list of states—fourteen at the start of 2013—that protected trans people from discrimination in employment, housing, and public spaces.

Jack thought for a moment, then looked me in the eyes and said with a determined tone, “Okay. Let’s change that.”

If anyone could help push through legislation that would protect transgender rights, it was Jack.

That fall, while I interned at the White House, Jack had won reelection by a landslide of epic proportions, nearly 70 percent of the vote. A few months after the election, Jack publicly declared his support for marriage equality and made clear he would support an effort to legalize same-sex marriage in Delaware during that legislative session year.

While it wasn’t news to me, I was thrilled by this public declaration, but the concern that the trans equality bill would be scrapped entirely in the effort to pass a marriage equality bill rushed back to the forefront of my mind. I wanted to pass each of the bills and Delaware’s LGBTQ community deserved both; same-sex couples deserved and needed the right to marry, and transgender people, who didn’t even have basic protections from day-to-day discrimination, desperately needed action.

One of our first steps was to schedule a more formal meeting with Jack and his staff to discuss strategy for both bills. The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer civil rights organization, was working closely with Equality Delaware to provide support in our historic undertaking, and a representative from the organization would join us for the meeting with the governor.

Ahead of the legislature’s six-month session, we made our way to Jack’s office in Wilmington. It had been four years since I was in the governor’s office, located on the top floor of a large state office building downtown. After we waited for a few moments in a conference room, Jack and his chief of staff entered from a side door that led to his private office. I had been in that room many, many times while working for the governor, and I knew Jack like a family member. Still, I was nervous in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. This was my first time on the outside, advocating in.

After exchanging pleasantries, we launched into the plans Equality Delaware and the Human Rights Campaign had for the coming legislative session. The Human Rights Campaign would be sending field staff to Delaware to help organize an issue-based campaign that was unprecedented for the state.

Sitting there, though, my palms were sweaty and my heart was racing. I knew Jack walked into the meeting supportive, but this was the time to see whether he was as committed as he seemed in that conversation on AU’s campus the previous summer.

I was prepared and ready to interject whenever the conversation steered too exclusively into the marriage bill, but from the start it was clear that this wasn’t necessary. Every time we talked about marriage, Jack would pipe up:

“And what about the nondiscrimination bill?”

“You’re planning the same for the trans bill?”

“That will be the same for the gender identity bill, right?”

He was determined and was making it clear that both bills were a priority for him.

He closed the meeting with an unexpected declaration: “We need to pass the marriage bill, but we really need to pass the nondiscrimination bill.” It was clear that Jack wasn’t like other state leaders when it came to LGBTQ issues. Two bills weren’t too many. I was relieved, but mostly proud of Jack.

While his commitment was integral to pushing the bill, he wasn’t the only statewide elected official we hoped to gain support from. Since we anticipated that opponents of the gender identity bill would import talking points from the fight for trans rights in other states, we knew we needed help from an elected official with strong public safety credentials.

In other battles for trans rights, anti-equality activists and politicians had stoked unfounded fears that protecting transgender people from discrimination throughout daily life, including in restrooms, would allow sexual predators to dress up as women to harm or assault women and, particularly, young girls.

The argument was completely disingenuous. A person intent on committing a crime in a restroom is offered no cover from laws that merely protect transgender people from discrimination or harassment. More than a dozen states and more than a hundred cities had passed similar bills without any problems of that kind. These arguments were just recycled talking points from previous gay-rights fights.

“Protect our children,” read the antigay signs in the 1970s and ’80s. “Preserve parents’ rights to protect their children from teachers who are immoral and who promote a perverted lifestyle.” Just as these arguments preyed on people’s stereotypes and ignorance about gay identities, so too do these new antitrans arguments. They feed on the lack of understanding of trans identities. They were wrong and false then and they are wrong and false now, but they were politically potent.

Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, a smart, young, handsome elected official, had made protecting children from sexual assault a centerpiece of his time in office. The son of Delaware’s longtime senator and U.S. vice president Joe Biden, Beau was a rising star in the national Democratic Party. He had skyrocketed to the nation’s public consciousness with a heartfelt and compelling introduction of his dad at the 2008 Democratic National Convention and had served as a JAG officer in Iraq during his father’s first term as vice president.

Like Jack, Beau was a former boss of mine. When I was sixteen years old, I had interned on Beau’s first race, his successful 2006 campaign for attorney general. He won in a close contest against a longtime state prosecutor and was sworn in early the next year.

Beau and I hit it off on the 2006 campaign, and four years later, I returned to work for his reelection campaign during the summer of 2010. In that role, I occasionally revisited the old responsibilities I had with Jack, serving as a traveling aide and driver for Beau. While campaigning together up and down the state, we were often asked if I was Beau’s kid because of our similar smiles and comfortable rapport.

I’d occasionally hold over Beau’s head the fact that voters would think he was old enough to have a kid my age, but he was the type of boss who didn’t mind a harmless ribbing. Beau was eminently down-to-earth and notably compassionate. Similar to Jack, he was the type of elected official who was exactly the same behind closed doors as he was out in public.

When I was coming out to close friends and family, I had wanted to come out to Beau personally, but given his national profile, I held off on reaching out, worried that I would burden him. Instead, Beau learned about my news through my public coming-out note. That evening, I got a call from him.

“Sarah,” he started. I was struck by his seamless adoption of my new name. “It’s Beau. I just saw your coming-out note.”

He was driving with his wife, Hallie, and wanted to call to express his love and continued friendship. “I’m here with Hallie and we just want you to know that we love you, we stand with you, and you are still as much a part of the Biden family as ever. This doesn’t change anything.”

A few weeks after my meeting at the governor’s office, I reached out to Beau to get together, catch up, and talk about the gender identity nondiscrimination bill. I told him we’d need his help to push back on the lies that would inevitably come from our opponents. I worried that bringing up the counterarguments to our bill might cause Beau to beg off, not wanting to get into the middle of a controversial fight. But he was unequivocal in his support and his willingness to help.

“Just let me know what you need,” he assured me.

Two weeks later, I ran into Beau again at the vice president’s official residence, the Naval Observatory, in Washington, D.C., at an event celebrating the second inauguration of President Obama and Beau’s father. He informed me that one of his top deputies, the head of his Child Predator Unit, Patty Dailey Lewis, would be working with us to pass the gender identity bill. It might seem weird that the head of the child predator office would be running point for our trans equality bill, but Patty was perfect. She was a kind middle-aged woman who worked on defending children from sexual assault, and there was no one better positioned to push back against the myth that trans protections would embolden those wishing to sexually assault young girls in bathrooms.

After talking with Beau, I made my way across the tent to say hello to Vice President Biden and potentially grab a picture with him. I hadn’t spoken to the vice president since coming out, although I had seen him several times while interning at the White House. I walked up to him with my phone in hand, ready to ask for a picture. But before I could even say anything, he put both arms on my shoulders and looked me square in the eyes.

“Hey, kiddo. I just want you to know that Beau is so proud of you, Jill is so proud of you, and I’m so proud of you. I wanna know one thing, are ya happy?”

“I am,” I responded, taken aback that he had even heard about my transition.

“That makes me so happy. Give me a hug!” He pulled me in for an enveloping embrace, a quintessential gesture for the gregarious vice president.

It was a powerful moment for me. As much as I had cherished that signed Joe Biden schedule growing up, this small interaction meant infinitely more to me. If meeting Joe Biden at eleven had assured me of my love of politics, his embrace at twenty-two helped confirm my belief that despite the cynicism that surrounds politics, there are still good and decent people in the arena. And with the support of both the Bidens and the Markells strongly behind us on the gender identity bill, I felt prepared for the fight to come in Delaware.

Unfortunately, support from statewide elected officials, even powerful ones such as Jack and Beau, could get us only so far. To pass the bill, we would need to convince a majority of legislators in both chambers—at least twenty-one members of the State House and eleven members of the State Senate—to vote in favor of the Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Act of 2013.

While the Democrats controlled both houses, Delaware’s leading party had always been notoriously cautious. Conservative Democratic elected officials from the southern part of the state, although shrinking in numbers, had blocked social progress for decades. And even in 2013, the number of conservative Democrats and Republicans was still large enough that we would need to hold every progressive Democrat in both chambers and gain at least one Republican in the State Senate.

Joe Biden was a giant to me growing up; he and his son demonstrated such compassion after I came out.

Our bill was not likely to come up for another few months, in May or June of that year, as they always hold the most controversial bills until near the end of session. But beginning in January, every day that the legislature was in session and I was not in class, I would drive to our state capitol in Dover, sometimes with Lisa and Mark from Equality Delaware, often with my mom, and when he was able to get out of work, my dad would join, too. While my parents were still getting used to my transition, they didn’t hesitate when I asked them to join me to lobby for the bill. As they has made clear, they supported me and would stand by me no matter what.

Delaware’s capitol, Legislative Hall, is a colonial redbrick building modeled after Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the founders declared independence and signed the U.S. Constitution. It sits at the end of a large green in the heart of Dover’s government district. By state-capitol standards, Legislative Hall is on the smaller side, which only adds to the bustling atmosphere of tourists, lobbyists, activists, and legislators who fill the halls each day the General Assembly meets.

While we worked to assemble a larger army of transgender people to advocate for the bill, I effectively camped out at Legislative Hall. One by one, I’d meet with lawmakers. We started with friendly legislators and worked our way out.

At first, I felt lost. I had been so used to advocating on behalf of others—candidates or a student body—that I didn’t quite know how to explicitly advocate for myself. I wanted to talk about facts and statistics. I thought that if I could present the most cogent case, my arguments would win the day. Talking about myself felt self-indulgent.

I didn’t know how to be personal in my approach, but I’d watch legislators react to my parents—many of them were moms and dads themselves and sympathized with my parents’ fears. My mother would tell legislators through inevitable tears, “We were so scared when Sarah came out. All any parent wants is for their child to be happy, healthy, and fulfilled.”

Watching her get through to them successfully, I felt like my voice didn’t really matter. “I don’t know, I just don’t feel like I’m connecting,” I expressed to my mom in the car ride back from Dover one day. “I feel like I’m useless.”

But my voice did matter. It just turned out that I wasn’t actually using it. What I was saying could have been offered by anyone. Making a cogent case wasn’t my job; I needed to make a compelling case. I was ignoring the emotion that was at the heart of my own progressivism: empathy.

I had understood the importance of building empathy during my time at the White House, but the moment I went from subtly educating to blatantly advocating, I abruptly forgot that lesson. In part, I think I moved to what felt like colder and more distant arguments so that I could protect myself from feeling personally rejected if the bill failed. I knew that for many of these legislators, I was the face that came to their minds when the bill was discussed, and that reality would escalate in the months ahead.

How could I not take it personally, though? For all of us, the political is personal. And the truth is this: Sometimes vulnerability is the best, or only, path to justice. Those with power or privilege won’t extend equality easily. Logic isn’t enough. The legislators had to see that transgender people are people. They had to understand our fears. Our hopes. They had to see our families. They had to feel the humanity of the issue. And then, we hoped, they would no longer be able to look us in the eyes and deny us the equal protection of the laws they swore to uphold.

There had been a debate about which bill would come first, the marriage bill or the trans bill. I discussed the point extensively with Lisa, Mark, and the rest of the Equality Delaware board. I started to worry that the warnings of the older activists would come to fruition if we pushed the marriage bill first.

“Legislators will be exhausted after the marriage fight,” I said to Lisa and Mark. “They won’t have any energy left for the fight that they are less excited about.”

Lisa is a “legislator whisperer” if there ever was one. “I actually think the legislators will be energized after the marriage fight,” she said. “They will feel empowered after making history and they’ll be fired up to do it again.”

It was a risky gamble, but if accurate, it was likely the best bet to pass both. The fact of the matter remained that the trans-rights bill likely wouldn’t have had the same impact of energizing legislators.

While we laid the foundation on the trans-rights bill by meeting with legislators and developing relationships, the marriage equality bill moved forward. On April 23, it passed the State House by a vote of twenty-three to eighteen, and three weeks later, the bill came to the Senate floor.

Activists had swarmed Legislative Hall in anticipation of its passing, and Governor Markell had promised to sign the bill immediately upon passage. I sat in the gallery to watch the final vote. Debate stretched on for hours in the Senate. At one point, an older conservative Democrat stood up in opposition to the marriage bill.

“And what’s next?” the eighty-five-year-old senator cried in his deep southern accent. “We pass this bill today and we know they’ll come back to us with that transgender bill!”

Eventually, after a long debate, the marriage equality bill passed by a vote of twelve to nine, and just two hours later, Jack stood behind a small desk on the landing of the grand staircase in the middle of Legislative Hall surrounded by hundreds of celebrating advocates.

“Tonight, with the signing of this law,” he proclaimed, “we say to any Delawarean, regardless of sexual orientation: If you have committed yourself to somebody, and you’ve made that pledge to spend your life together in partnership, your love is equally valid and deserving and your family is now equal under the law.”

He sat down at the desk with the seal of the state of Delaware on its front. Several pens sat before him as he signed each letter with a different one, handing the pens to Lisa, Mark, and several lawmakers as souvenirs. He put the last pen down and stood up with the bill in his hand, thrusting it into the air to thunderous applause and countless flashes of cameras.

I was exceptionally proud to have worked for Jack that day and moved by the history we were witnessing, but I could feel the butterflies in my stomach as we jubilantly walked out of Legislative Hall. The marriage bill had passed. Now eyes turned to the trans equality bill.

Showtime.