CHAPTER 7
One step closer to justice.
After an emotional and volatile win in the Senate, I didn’t have time to enjoy our success before we had to begin gearing up for our fight in the State House, one that might be even harder.
After our opponents’ loss in the Senate, they readied for a full-court press in the House. The Delaware Family Policy Council, having seen the power of families in our advocacy, blasted out an email to their lists calling on conservative women and their children to show up for the House committee hearing to oppose SB 97.
Before a bill comes to the floor of the full chamber, it must first make its way through a smaller committee hearing. Just a week after the Senate vote—seven excruciating, stressful days spent trying to firm up anxious, supportive legislators—the bill was heard in the State House Administrative Committee. The email from the DFPC worked. Dozens of mothers showed up to testify, in many cases dragging their kids along, too.
Emboldened by the stereotypes spoon-fed to them by the DFPC, the moms’ testimony largely threw out the subtlety of the arguments we had heard from the Republican senators, who bent over backward to make clear that they weren’t talking about transgender people but rather “individuals pretending to be transgender.” The professed distinction between transgender people and “individuals pretending to be transgender” was disingenuous from the start, a dog whistle that lost its nuance with the larger public.
As I waited to testify, I stood behind a line of mothers who stepped up one by one, clutching their children tightly, as though they were in some sort of danger in Legislative Hall. Most of the women were middle-aged, some wearing T-shirts with trite antitrans slogans like “God made men and women” and “No men in women’s restrooms,” language the LGBTQ community would see in future nondiscrimination fights.
In their speeches, one woman referred to us as “freaks.” Another as “sinners.” But “predators” was, once again, the word of the day. Standing behind these women, I could feel the disdain they held for transgender people, or at least who they thought we were. It was palpable.
My palms were sweaty as I patiently waited my turn to speak. Intellectually, I knew that their prejudice—their hate—was a by-product of their ignorance. They had been exposed only to lies and distortions about who transgender people are, and not just from the head of the DFPC, who stood in front of me, but also from the media, popular culture, and too many pulpits.
As we waited in a line that led to the lectern in the center of the room, the head of the DFPC turned around and introduced herself to me. Her seemingly warm smile and respectful introduction belied the clear contempt she held for people like me, hatred so deep that it compelled her to spend her life opposing the rights of LGBTQ people.
She stepped up to the lectern first to deliver her remarks in opposition. I moved to her side, making sure that everyone could see my face as she delivered her hateful talking points. When she closed, it was my turn. I stepped up to the lectern and delivered the same remarks I had given in the Senate, an introduction of myself and my humanity.
And as I spoke—looking out at a sea of faces assembled to oppose my rights—I could see discomfort slowly cross the faces of many of the moms who had shown up to oppose our bill. It wasn’t discomfort at being in the presence of a trans person. It was discomfort at the slow realization that the caricatures they had in their minds were unfounded. It was discomfort at the guilt they were clearly feeling as I outlined, in emotional terms, the simple fact that I am a human being. Their shame was visible.
Fortunately, the mobilization by the DFPC didn’t stop the bill, at least at that point. The committee voted it through and to the full House by a vote of four to zero. Among those four was a moderate Republican woman from a suburb of Wilmington. I was surprised by her vote. My mother and I had met with her a few days prior, but despite her voting for sexual orientation nondiscrimination protections in 2009 and knowing my mother for years, we didn’t anticipate that she would end up voting for our bill. Her comments in the meeting with my mother and me hinted as much. When she voted to move the bill out of committee and on to the full House, I was impressed. Perhaps she’s had a change of heart, I thought.
As she packed up her papers from the dais, I walked up to her.
“Thank you for your vote, Representative.”
“You’re welcome, but I want you to know I won’t be voting for the bill when it comes to floor,” she replied.
“You know us. You know our family. Why can’t we count on your support?”
She coolly informed me that “it’s just too soon. You haven’t done enough public education yet. The public isn’t ready for this.”
I tried to reason with her. “Representative, people are losing their jobs and their homes. Without these protections, transgender people don’t feel safe stepping out publicly. It takes a huge risk to educate.”
“It’s just too soon.”
“When you ask transgender people to allow a conversation to occur before you grant us equal rights, you are asking people to watch their one life pass by without dignity and respect,” I said. “The question has been called, Representative. Either you vote for the protections or vote for discrimination. It is as simple as that.”
“I voted for the gay rights bills,” she offered in her defense.
“Then explain to me why you believe my brother should be protected but not me.”
“I’m a good person,” she said, almost pleading for forgiveness. She wanted me to absolve her of her guilt for voting no.
But I wouldn’t give in. “Then show me that with your vote. Otherwise it’s just words.”
I walked away. Frankly, that representative was the least of my worries. The nerves among the Democratic ranks were fraying, particularly after witnessing the brigade of conservative women show up for the committee hearing. The calls and emails against the bill were starting to compete with the numbers on our side. Word was coming back to us that we were losing votes.
During the few excruciating days between the committee vote and the full House’s vote, Mark, Lisa, and I met with our field team in the “war room” we had set up in a downtown Wilmington law firm to strategize and reach out to legislators on the fence. The usually calm and tranquil Lisa and Mark were clearly concerned about the vote count.
“She is very, very nervous,” Lisa told me, referring to one legislator from downstate Delaware, the more conservative region of the state. If this legislator rescinded her support, we could anticipate that other, less progressive representatives in more conservative districts would flip, too. “I’m not sure if we can hold her. She was actually crying and told me, ‘I gave Sarah my word.’ ”
I had met with that legislator during the whip count and she told me she was a firm yes, but that was before the anti-equality forces geared up for the fight and inundated her with calls and emails. Legislators are constantly required to balance their own beliefs with the positions of their constituents. On some issues, such as traffic patterns, it makes sense to exclusively represent the needs and interests of your district. But on other issues, legislators are elected to exercise their own judgment. That’s why we elect our representatives instead of making every decision by referendum. What’s right isn’t always what’s most popular. And when it came to what Andy called first principles—issues such as equal rights—there was just no excuse.
“Should I go meet with her?” I offered, thinking that if she was emotional about her commitment to me, then seeing me might reinforce her resolve.
Knowing the currency of “their word” among these legislators, Lisa said we should do the exact opposite. This was the moment that the whip count was built for.
“We don’t want to give her a chance to go back on her word. If you meet with her, that gives her the opportunity to change her commitment. No,” Lisa continued, “we need to make sure she feels the love and firm up her spine, but her standing commitment to you might be the one thing that keeps her on our side.” So we had our field team work to increase the number of calls from our supporters in her district.
“If you see her, run the other way,” Lisa remarked, only half-jokingly.
The other faction of votes we were slowly losing was from a group of older and middle-aged men in the Democratic caucus. Moderates one and all, these legislators were already uncomfortable with the issue at hand.
“I think we need to bring in the big guns,” Lisa said, referring to the governor. We had held off on having Jack wade too deeply into the fight, reserving his political capital for a bind precisely like this one. I had served as our primary liaison to Jack, meeting with him routinely to update him on the vote proceedings and getting his advice on messaging and tactics.
I stepped out of the conference room and called him. “We need your help.”
I traded calls with him all day, touching base each time he spoke with one of the shaky, moderate good ol’ boys. A request from the governor carries a different weight than an ask from anyone else. Even for these legislators, being called directly by the governor wasn’t a normal occurrence, and knowing that they would likely, eventually, need something from Jack made saying no all the more difficult.
“I don’t know if I convinced him,” he’d recount. “These guys are pretty conservative. Some of them are Democrats just because they grew up Democrats.”
Nevertheless, the calls from the governor were intrinsically helpful, demonstrating that this was a priority for him. He usually didn’t actively lobby on particular bills like this. We worked through the weekend on these legislators, trying to figure out any pressure points we could exert. But eventually we ran out of time.
I woke up the day of the House vote, June 18, unsure that we had enough yeses to pass the bill. And just as my family and I prepared to leave for the forty-minute drive to Dover, I got a call from Mark.
“We’re going to have to amend the bill,” he told me. “There just aren’t enough votes. Too many Democrats are scared over bathrooms.”
“Fuck.”
I started pacing around my family’s living room as Andy waited on the couch next to my mom and my brother Sean, who had come down to be with us on what we had anticipated would be the final day. Even an acceptable amendment would mean we’d have to go back to the Senate to have it approve the new version of the bill. I worried that there wouldn’t be the appetite to revisit what had been a contentious vote in the upper chamber.
“What’s the amendment going to look like?” I asked.
“We’re working on it now,” Mark said, referring to the lawyers including himself meeting in a room at Legislative Hall to iron out the language. “It would, one, clarify that gender identity ‘may be demonstrated by consistent and uniform assertion of the identity or other evidence that it is part of a person’s core identity.’ Two, it will allow for ‘reasonable accommodations’ to be made in facilities like locker rooms.”
The first clause was in response to the continued argument that a person might pretend to be transgender in order to enter a sex-specific facility. It tried to reinforce what had been our messaging all along, that trans identities are deeply held, not some “wake up in the morning and decide to do it” kind of thing.
The language was left open-ended and vague so as not to require presentation of evidence to, say, enter the restroom. It also contained a key legal word: “may.” “May,” as opposed to “shall,” makes the entire sentence optional.
Fine, I begrudgingly thought.
The second clause was more of an actual compromise. While it didn’t impact restrooms, where there were already partitions, it did allow for businesses with locker rooms to make accommodations specifically for transgender people so long as we were still allowed to utilize facilities consistent with our gender identity. For instance, a curtain could be installed and they could request a transgender woman change her clothes behind it within the women’s locker room.
Transgender people are concerned for their privacy just like everyone else. Many of us are already petrified of being in a locker room, and to the degree that we utilize them, we are in and out as quickly as possible without drawing attention to ourselves. That a transgender person could be separated from everyone else was stigmatizing.
The discomfort of others shouldn’t be grounds for differential treatment. And when you do that, when you single us out, it puts a bull’s-eye on our backs for harassment and bullying and reinforces the prejudice that we are not really the gender we are.
The language in the amendment was discriminatory, but the choice before me was between passing the rest of the bill with the language, potentially having a worse amendment added, or passing no bill at all. And we needed to make a decision within the next two hours.
“Okay,” I responded tentatively, thoroughly unsure of my decision to agree to the compromise amendment.
As Andy and I drove down to Dover, I had him review the language of the amendment. I needed a lawyer who was trans to take a look. I needed to know that it would work.
The amendment wasn’t great, but he thought that the language might allow us to get around it in regulations, meaning that the wording was vague enough that we could interpret it after the fact in a way that left it relatively toothless, erasing as much negative impact as possible.
When we arrived at Legislative Hall, I walked into the House majority leader’s office to see Mark, Lisa, and our prime sponsor, Bryon Short, huddled over a table. Everyone was dressed to the nines, wearing their “Sunday best” in anticipation of what they, too, hoped would be the final day of the battle, followed by a signing ceremony with the governor that evening. But now that we were going to have to go back to the Senate, it felt all for naught.
Mark walked toward me in a huff. “We have another problem.”
A Democratic member, in his own misguided attempt to bridge the divide on the bill, had drafted his own amendment without consulting anyone. His potential amendment would make bathroom access determined by one’s assigned sex at birth, meaning that if we ended up using restrooms at all, trans women would have to use the men’s room and trans men would have to use the women’s room.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I screamed. My normally restrained use of the f-word was flowing freely that morning.
The amendment was about as discriminatory as you can get. It didn’t exclude bathrooms from the protections; it effectively banned transgender people from restrooms consistent with our gender identity. It was similar to the policy that conservatives would pass in North Carolina three years later, but it was even worse because it wouldn’t be limited to just government buildings like the future HB2. The proposed amendment would set discriminatory bathroom policies in every workplace and business impacted by the law.
The legislator in question wasn’t a bigoted person, just ignorant on the topic. He was sincerely trying to help, but in his failure to consult with any of us and come in at the eleventh hour as a hero, he had drafted the worst amendment possible.
“We’ll kill our own bill if this gets added, right?” I asked.
“We’ll have to kill it,” Mark confirmed.
The thought of losing the entire bill after coming so far was disheartening and incredibly frustrating, but permanently passing into law a ban on trans people in bathrooms consistent with our gender identity was poison. If transgender people can’t access restrooms consistent with who we are, it becomes almost impossible to participate in public life. The other nondiscrimination protections wouldn’t mean much if we couldn’t leave our homes for more than two hours. And if we had the gall to use the restroom of our gender, the language would only embolden the already dangerous discrimination that transgender people face in those spaces.
“I think he’ll pull the amendment if we can get to him,” Mark said. “But if it gets filed”—referring to the process of formally submitting a bill or amendment to the House clerk—“it may become impossible to defeat the amendment. Republicans and moderate Democrats will jump on it, and they may have the votes to add it to the bill.”
Simply put, if the bad amendment were made public, it would likely become an unstoppable force. We’d have to kill our own bill.
I raced to the representative’s office to try to stop him. He wasn’t there.
Shit, he’s filed the amendment, I thought.
I ran down two flights of stairs to the basement room where legislators formally file bills and amendments with the nonpartisan clerk. I asked if they had seen the legislator in question.
“No.”
Thank God.
As I ran back upstairs to his office, I came across my mom. Knowing the power of her presence, I told her to join me, and we both hurried to the legislator’s office to camp outside. While we waited there, we filed our own amendment. Problematic as it may have been, it was one we could live with. Eventually, the representative I was waiting for arrived.
He’s a jovial man, warm and friendly, supportive of the bill, but clearly failing to grasp the central controversy of the legislation.
“I heard about your amendment,” I told him. I didn’t want to seem argumentative, lest he get defensive. “And while I want to thank you for trying to help us out, we’ve drafted an amendment that we think will satisfy concerns.”
A simple “thanks but no thanks.”
“Oh, that’s great,” he said, completely unaware that he had almost destroyed our bill.
“So you won’t be filing your amendment?” I hesitantly asked.
“I guess not! I was just trying to help. But if you all have a solution, that’s great,” he happily responded.
“Thank you! Thank you! We are so appreciative of your support for this bill.” I jumped up to shake his hand. He was probably confused by my enthusiastic reaction, not knowing the heart attack he almost gave all of us. Now wasn’t the time to pile onto him for his almost-fatal mistake.
I ran across Legislative Hall to meet Mark and Lisa outside the office of the leader of the Senate, Patty Blevins, one of the two women who sponsored our bill in that chamber. We sat in silence as we waited for her to get out of a meeting. We needed to inform her that there would be an amendment and that, should the bill make it through the House, it would have to come back to the Senate.
As supportive as Senator Blevins had been, we worried that her caucus would balk at the second vote and that political exhaustion would end up destroying our chances for getting the bill all the way to Jack’s desk for his signature. The amendment was our only way to save the bill in the House, but it could end up destroying the bill anyway, if the Senate was feeling cowardly.
Finally, Blevins was ready to see us. Lisa explained that we were adding an amendment in the House and that we’d need to return to the Senate. We all held our breath as we waited for her to respond.
Blevins let out a frustrated exhale. We weren’t sure whether she was frustrated that the House couldn’t stand up to the bigotry of the bathroom arguments like the Senate had done or because the Senate would have to deal with the issue again.
Even though Lisa asked the question, Senator Blevins looked right at me.
“This is the most important bill we will vote on this year. If you can pass the bill through the House early enough today, we’ll take it back up immediately tonight. If it passes the House too late today, we’ll take it up first thing tomorrow.” With that, she stood up from her desk and, continuing to look at me, said, “Don’t worry. We won’t let you down.”
After three different fires that morning, all our ducks were in a row. We just needed enough Democrats to return to our side to give us a majority of twenty-one.
While the Democrats met upstairs, we waited patiently but nervously in the lobby. The House caucus meeting was dragging on and on. Minutes turned into hours. There were clearly disagreements.
I sat there and talked with Andy to pass the time, playing boring games like tic-tac-toe and hangman. I could hardly focus, my nerves overwhelming any other thoughts. As we played, I heard someone call my name.
“Sarah!”
I turned around to see an angry woman, maybe one of the moms who had showed up to the committee hearing the previous week.
“I just have one question for you. Have you had the surgery yet?”
“Um. I don’t think that is any of your business,” I replied, stunned.
To this day, it always amazes me when people think they are entitled to information about my body. I would never ask a stranger about their genitals. But I quickly got the sense that this woman didn’t care if she was imposing, let alone offending me.
“Oh, I think it is my business,” she insisted. “And if I ever see you in the women’s bathroom with me, I’ll chop it right off.”
Still processing the initial rudeness, I almost didn’t realize what the woman had just said to me: that she would assault me if she saw me in the restroom. Andy, who was still standing right next me, jumped in.
“Ma’am, that is completely out of line,” he said, pulling me away from the situation and offering her the respect she was unwilling to offer us.
He walked me over to Lisa and Mark, and astounded and angry, I recounted the exchange to them.
“That woman threatened to violently assault you,” Mark remarked, shocked at her comments. He suggested I report the woman to the Capitol Police.
I reluctantly decided to do it. I wanted a record of this woman’s comments and threat of physical violence, but I was embarrassed and worried about the reaction I’d get from the officers. I didn’t want to talk to them about my body, even if it was just in reference to the comments the woman had made. I was worried that they’d laugh at me.
Frankly, in the grand scheme of things, being laughed at by the police would have been a relatively tame encounter for a transgender person interacting with law enforcement. One survey found that among transgender people who had interacted with a police officer who thought or knew that they were transgender, 58 percent reported mistreatment. That might include officers unintentionally or intentionally disrespecting trans people’s identities by calling them by the wrong pronoun. It could include profiling of trans women as sex workers, a presumed offense many people call “walking while trans.” For others, it could include violence, and for trans women of color, the risk of this treatment skyrockets.
These experiences led more than half of transgender people overall to say that they were uncomfortable asking the police for help. Even though my race, my social status, and the setting ensured that being laughed at was the most I had to worry about, I was still apprehensive.
But I stepped into the small office of the Capitol Police, right next to the metal detectors and X-ray machine at the entrance to the building. Word for word, I told the officers what had happened. I wasn’t laughed at, but I didn’t get the impression that the officers cared much for my report. They implied that the woman’s threat was par for the course. They suggested that it was what I got for working publicly to pass a controversial bill.
They’re probably right, I thought.
But as I walked over to the House chamber with Andy to wait in a part of the building away from the woman who’d threatened me, I realized the absurdity of that suggestion. No one should ever be threatened with violence for exercising their constitutional right to advocate to their elected representatives. I had come to terms with the physical risk of advocacy, but that doesn’t mean I should have to tolerate it. The threat of violence shouldn’t be part and parcel of advocating for your own dignity.
Was I surprised that someone threatened me? No. But the fact that it wasn’t surprising should be an outrage. It further underscored the need for the bill and, in particular, for protections from discrimination and harassment in restrooms. It also brought front and center the risk of being the public face of a bill that came with the potential for retribution.
You can get lost in the fear that comes with that risk. It can consume you, but I just had to do my best to put it in the back of my mind. There was too much work to do and too many people for whom that fear was even more warranted.
Finally, at about three p.m., the caucus broke and we anxiously awaited any news on the preliminary vote they had taken in the meeting. A few minutes later, the speaker of the House entered through a side door of the chamber and caught my eye—he gave Mark, Lisa, and me a thumbs-up.
“We’ve got it,” Lisa quietly but confidently affirmed.
Thank God.
We didn’t want to celebrate too early; we still had the floor debate and then had to go back to the Senate. But with the speaker’s confirmation, we could feel more than just cautiously optimistic.
When all the members had returned to the chamber, the House officially convened and took up our bill. Our prime sponsor, Bryon Short, the handsome small-business owner, did an excellent job answering questions on the legislation. He had perfectly retained all of the points we had laid out in a briefing book I put together the week before. Unlike in the Senate, we weren’t going to spend time on our witnesses. We wanted to pass the bill as quickly as possible and, we hoped, to get it over to the Senate that same day.
Unfortunately, the Republicans weren’t going to let us have it that easy. They knew that the longer they stalled, the less likely it would be that the Senate would take the bill up that night. And they knew that any delay would give the Delaware Family Policy Council a greater chance to destroy our slim majority in the Senate, however small their chance was.
After fielding the predictable questions—about bathrooms, locker rooms, liability, and other objections—Representative Short called up the compromise amendment. It passed with twenty-five votes, four more than a majority. It was a good sign, but it was still possible that several votes in favor of the amendment might not go with us on the overall bill.
After the amendment was officially added to the bill, one of the wavering Democrats, an older man named Earl Jaques, rose to ask a question. Jacques, pronounced “Jakes,” looks like a television evangelist, with big 1980s glasses and slicked-back, thinning, jet-black hair. He hadn’t historically been good on our issues.
“I just want to make clear, this amendment was meant to address the concerns some of us have raised regarding locker rooms?” he asked of Short, a softball question that would allow our sponsor to give him clear cover.
“Yes, sir,” Representative Short responded, with a smile on his face demonstrating his appreciation for the easy question.
“I wasn’t sure how I would vote on this bill,” Jaques continued. “But last night I called my granddaughter. I told her we were considering this bill and I asked her if she had heard this word ‘transgender.’ She said, ‘Of course, Grandpa. There’s a transgender kid at my school.’
“And when I told her what the bill did, she was amazed that it wasn’t already the law.”
This was a refrain we heard several times in Legislative Hall. Legislators couldn’t understand the issue, but when they spoke to their kids or grandkids, they understood that there was a clear side to be on.
A deeply religious man, Jaques closed: “And if Jesus can love the leper, then I can vote for this bill.”
A faulty comparison to be sure, but given the circumstances, I’d most definitely take it. Jaques had made clear that his faith called him to the side of compassion, but his granddaughter had provided him with the answer.
Throughout the fight for equality, young people have been on the front lines of change. When President Obama endorsed marriage equality in 2012, he cited something very simple for his change of heart: conversations with his daughters. Earl Jaques’s granddaughter had given him a glimpse into the future. That, coupled with his own faith and a little political cover, provided him with a clear path to yes.
Sensing the power of the moment and the permission that Jaques’s comments gave to other Democrats to vote for the bill, Short called for a roll call. Out came our checklists and pens, ready to tally the votes. One by one, the clerk of the House called out the names of members of the State House.
My pen struck through the yes blocks next to each representative’s name one at a time, but there was no need. We knew exactly who we needed by memory, having agonized over this list for weeks.
After forty-one names were called, the clerk read the results, “Twenty-four yeses, seventeen nos, zero representatives not voting, and zero absent.”
Like in the Senate, the gallery exploded with cheers when the speaker gaveled the bill passed. We were on the brink of victory, but I felt like I couldn’t exhale until the bill finally cleared its last hurdle and landed on Jack’s desk. It still needed to go back over to the Senate for approval of the amended language.
While it was too late to go back to the Senate that night, Senator Blevins kept her word and brought the bill up for a vote first thing the next day. The delay by the Republicans in the House had meant that Andy wouldn’t be able to be there for the final vote in the Senate, as he had been for every other vote, but I knew he was there in mind and spirit.
My parents and I sat in the same chairs we had occupied in the Senate two weeks prior. Mark, Lisa, and I all hoped that the debate would be short and we could pass the bill, as amended, without much debate. But when Senator Henry, again managing the bill on the Senate floor, tried to move things along rather quickly, the conservative Republicans, largely just out of spite, put a wrench in the operation. It was clear they were going to make us wait.
“The fact that this bill has come back before us is a sign that this should slow down,” remarked one conservative senator. “The people aren’t ready for this.”
Karen Peterson, the openly gay senator who had held my hand while my parents testified the first time around, rose to speak. She was clearly annoyed that the Republicans were just delaying the inevitable and wasting everyone’s time.
“Do you need Sarah to come back up so she can remind you of the discrimination faced by this community?” she asked rhetorically, basically saying, in so many words, “We can get Sarah back up here to lecture your asses again.”
Senator Henry seized the moment and popped up from her chair. “Roll call, Mr. President.”
For one final time, the clerk called the roll on SB 97. Confident that we still had our eleven votes, I looked up from my vote tally sheet and took in the moment. Each yes felt good—viscerally good—a needed affirmation for the trans people again gathered in the gallery. When each supportive legislator said “yes,” each of us heard something far more personal and powerful. We heard, “I see you and I love you.”
When we reached that eleventh vote, I let out a huge sigh of relief. We did it. I can’t believe it. We fucking did it.
Almost no one thought we would succeed. Six months before, this bill seemed impossible to most. And people thought there was no way we could pass both marriage equality and trans protections. But over the last several months, hundreds of transgender people had written, called, and met with their elected representatives. Thousands of allies had spoken out. We had endured the indignity of the hate spewed at us throughout the process. And we had prevailed. Our voices had been heard. And our little state made history by taking one of the single largest leaps forward on equality of any state in one year.
Trans folks from across the state crammed into the governor’s ceremonial office on the second floor of Legislative Hall with us to witness the official signing.
Jack walked in and gave me a big hug before taking his place at the lectern with the large seal of the state of Delaware on the front. I stood just behind him as he addressed the media and assembled crowd. “Today, we guarantee that our transgender relatives and neighbors can work hard, participate in our communities, and live their lives with dignity and safety.”
As he continued to speak, he turned toward me. “I especially want to thank my friend Sarah McBride, an intelligent and talented Delawarean who happens to be transgender. Her tireless advocacy for passage of this legislation has made a real difference for all transgender people in Delaware.”
He then closed his remarks and asked if I’d like to say something. I nodded and changed places with him.
“Today is a great day for Delaware and I could not be prouder to be a Delawarean. I’m grateful for the compassionate and courageous legislators who stood up for basic fairness for all people, for the governor and attorney general’s support, and for the LGBT activists and allies whose tireless work made this day possible. After today’s vote, transgender people now know that Delaware is a safe and welcoming state for everyone to live and work.
“Tomorrow, transgender Delawareans will wake up and finally know that the state they love loves them, too.”
Announcing, “This is Senate Bill Ninety-seven,” Jack began to sign the bill, declaring, “Now, with this signature, and effective immediately, it is, in fact, the law of Delaware.”
The room burst into applause as Jack held up the newly enacted law. It had been less than a year since Jack and I met up on AU’s campus and talked about the need for this bill. “Let’s change that,” he had said to me. And we did.
Five years after I stood behind him on the night he won the governor’s office, I was now standing behind him as he signed the Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Act into law.
After his victory in 2008, standing beside him, I felt hope for the potential for change. Now, as he held up the newest law of the land, I felt a renewed sense of hope. But it was a stronger hope than I’d felt in 2008 with both Obama and Jack’s elections.
It was a hope rooted in the progress that I had seen since coming out. And even though I had come out just a little more than a year before, and had been so frightened and so scared at the time, now I realized that I had never felt so hopeful. It was a hope displayed in the faces of the countless everyday LGBTQ Americans I helped welcome into the White House as guests of the president of the United States; of the openly gay Marine who proposed to his future husband in front of a Christmas tree just outside the Blue Room; of the transgender kids seen and affirmed by the nation’s first Black president. It’s the hope infused with the warmth of finding love with the type of person who made me want to be a better person in every single way. And it’s a hope that was now etched into the law of my home state, the only one to enact both marriage and trans equality in the same year.
That night, my parents and I sat down for a celebratory dinner at a small neighborhood restaurant that we refer to as our “happy place.”
“This was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” my mom said. “But it’s also the most fulfilling thing I’ve done in all my life.”
“And we did it together, as a family,” I toasted.
As our glasses clinked, I got a message from one of the transgender people who had helped us pass the bill. He was out with his family at a restaurant, too. “I’m out to dinner with my folks,” it read. “And for the first time in my life, I feel like I belong here. This place finally feels like home.”
Jack holding up Delaware’s newest law, the Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Act of 2013. Mark (right) and Representative Bryon Short applaud behind Jack. I had never felt more hopeful than I did at this moment.
When you’ve never felt like you really belonged somewhere, it’s almost impossible to know what it will feel like to finally feel at home. As openly transgender people, we had taken the steps we needed to alleviate that constant feeling of homesickness when it came to our gender identity. But without social and legal equality, as tranquil as we may feel within our own identities, our souls still ache for a physical home, a place where we can feel welcomed, affirmed, loved, and seen. It’s a desire at the center of our shared humanity as people and one that mirrors our own experiences transitioning.
And while no law will ever be a silver bullet, no bill can change every heart or open every mind, and no protection can stamp out every act of discrimination, these laws provide a foundation. That night, we were one step closer to justice.