Sarah McBride on Why the Left Lost on Trans Rights

President Trump’s actions against transgender Americans have been stunningly wide-ranging. They’ve also been popular. Trump has sought new restrictions on trans people in sports, schools, the military, prisons and medical care, and in government documentation. And a recent poll found that a majority of Americans approve of how Mr. Trump is handling trans issues — far above how he is handling his presidency generally. On trans-related issues, Americans’ opinions have moved right since 2022. What led the trans-rights movement to suffer not just a major electoral loss, but also a sweeping loss of public support? Sarah McBride is a freshman congresswoman from Delaware, where she was previously a state senator. And she is the first openly transgender member of Congress. In our conversation, Representative McBride reckons with the trans rights movement’s shortcomings, what liberalism should look like in a profoundly illiberal time and how to win hearts and minds through a politics of “grace.” It’s the most stirring defense of the practice of politics — with all its compromises and disappointments and frustrations — I’ve heard in some time. This episode contains strong language. Book Recommendations: Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin These Truths by Jill Lepore The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:31Ezra Klein?

  So Donald Trump, in his inauguration speech, was perfectly clear about what he intended to do.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.

• 0:50Ezra Klein?

  Starting the day of that speech, Trump launched an all-out effort to roll back trans rights, using every power the federal government had and some that it may not have.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  President Trump has signed an executive order which declares the US government will no longer recognize the concept of gender identity.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  President Trump directing the Secretary of Education to create a plan to cut funding for schools that teach what he calls "gender ideology."

• 1:17Speaker 04

  This afternoon, President Trump makes a move to ban transgender athletes from competing in women's sports.

• 1:22Speaker 05

  Ban on gender-affirming care for transgender inmates in federal prisons. Ban on transgender troops serving in the military.

• 1:29Speaker 06

  These executive orders, many of them have not actually gone into effect yet. But when I look across the country, we're already hearing the stories of impact.

• 1:38Speaker 07

  In a time when we are struggling to find people to volunteer to do this, we are begging to be allowed to continue our service, and you're just going to wash us away. So today, I'm not okay.

• 1:48Speaker 08

  It's a complete dehumanization of transgender people. Years and years and years into who I am, and I'm supposed to out myself? It's about privacy and dignity for me to be able to change my passport to male?

• 2:02Ezra Klein?

  A lot of the things Trump is doing in this term have put him on the wrong side of public opinion, but not this. In a recent poll where Trump's approval rating was around 40%, 52% of Americans approved of how he's handling trans issues. Another poll showed that was more than approved of Trump's handling of immigration, far more than approved of his handling of tariffs. And if you look more deeply into polling on trans rights, the public has swung right on virtually every policy you can poll. Trump didn't just win the election. He and the movement and ideology behind him have been winning the argument. Sarah McBride is a freshman Congresswoman from Delaware, where she was formerly a

• 2:43Ezra Klein?

  state senator. She is the first openly trans member of Congress, and her view is that the trans rights movement, and the left more broadly, has to grapple with why their strategy failed, how they lost not only power, but hearts and minds, and what needs to be done differently to protect trans people and begin winning back the public, starting right now. I was struck, talking to McBride, how much she was offering a theory that goes far beyond trans rights. What she's offering is a counter to the dominant political style that emerged as algorithmic social media collided with politics, a style that is more about policing and pushing those who agree with you than it is about persuading those who don't.

• 3:39Ezra Klein?

  Sarah McBride, welcome to the show.

• 3:41Sarah McBride?

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:42Ezra Klein?

  So I want to begin with some polling. So Pew asked the same set of questions in 2022 and 2025. And what it found was this collapse in, I would call it persuasion. So they polled the popularity of protecting trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing, public spaces. That had lost eight points in those three years. Requiring health insurance companies to cover gender transition lost five points. Requiring trans people to use bathrooms that match their biological sex gained eight points. When you hear those results, what to you happened there?

• 4:16Sarah McBride?

  By every objective metric, support for trans rights is worse now than it was six or seven years ago.

• 4:25Sarah McBride?

  And that's not isolated to just trans issues. I think if you look across issues of gender right now, you have seen a regression, right? Marriage equality support is actually lower now than it was a couple of years ago in a recent poll. We also see a regression around support for whether women should have the same opportunities as men compared to five, 10, 15 years ago. And so there's a larger regression from a gender perspective that I think is impacting this regression on trans rights. But I think it has been more acute, more significant in the trans rights space. I think, just candidly, I think we lost the art of persuasion. We lost the art of change making over the last couple of years.

• 5:10Sarah McBride?

  We're not in this position because of trans people. There was a very clear, well-coordinated, well-funded effort to demonize trans people, to stake out positions on fertile ground for anti-trans politics and to have those be the battlegrounds rather than some of the areas where there's more public support. We're not in this position because of the movement or the community, but clearly what we've been doing over the last several years has not been working to stave it off or continue the progress that we were making eight, nine, 10 years ago. And I think a lot of it can be traced to a false sense of security that I think the

• 5:52Sarah McBride?

  LGBTQ movement and the progressive movement writ large began to feel in sort of the post-marriage world. I think there was a sense of cultural momentum that was sort of this unending cresting wave. I think there is this sense of sort of a cultural victory that lulled us into a false sense of security and I think in many ways shut down needed conversations. And I think, you know, the support that we saw for trans rights in 2016, 2017, it was sort of a mirage of support in some ways because I think there was, in the post-marriage world, there was a transfer of support from the LGB to the T. I think for two reasons.

• 6:33Sarah McBride?

  One, I think people said, well, the T is part of the acronym, so I support gay people, so I'll support trans people. It's all the same movement. But two, I think in those early days after marriage, a lot of people

• 6:47Sarah McBride?

  Regretted having been wrong on marriage in the 90s and in the 2000s. And they went, you know, I didn't understand what it meant to be gay and therefore I didn't support marriage and I regret not supporting something because I didn't understand it. So I'm going to, without understanding, support trans rights because I don't want to make that same mistake again. And I think that resulted in a lot of us, a lot of our movement, stopping the conversation and ceasing doing the hard work of opening hearts and changing minds and telling stories that over 20 years had shifted and deepened understanding on gay identities that allowed

• 7:30Sarah McBride?

  for marriage equality to be built on solid ground. And I think that that allowed for the misinformation, the disinformation, that well-coordinated, well-funded campaign to really take advantage of that lack of understanding. And the support on trans rights was sort of a house built on sand.

• 7:50Ezra Klein?

  I want to connect two things you said there because I hadn't thought about this exactly before. So you made this point that there's been a generalized gender regression, which is true. And you also made this point that people had this metaphor in their minds that I was wrong about gay marriage. I didn't understand that experience, so maybe I'm wrong here too. But that one thing maybe that's different here is there's a sort of a set of narrow policies here, like nondiscrimination, and then a broader cultural effort, right? Everybody should put their pronouns in their bio or say them before they begin speaking at a meeting. It was more about destabilizing the gender binary.

• 8:33Ezra Klein?

  And there, people had a much stronger view, like, I do know what it means. I've been a man all my life. I've been a woman all my life. How dare you tell me how I have to talk about myself or refer to myself? And that that made the metaphor break because if the gay marriage fight was about what other people do, there was a dimension to this that was about what you do and how you should see yourself or your kids or your society.

• 8:55Sarah McBride?

  I think that that's inaccurate. Reflection of sort of the overplaying of the hand in some ways that we as a sort of coalition went to trans 201, trans 301, when people were still at a very much trans 101 stage one. And then two, I think there were requests that people perceived as sort of cultural aggression, which then allowed the right to say, we're punishing trans people because of their actions, rather than we're going after innocent bystanders. And I think some of the sort of cultural mores and norms that started to develop around

• 9:37Sarah McBride?

  inclusion of trans people were probably premature for a lot of people. We became absolutist, not just on trans rights. I think across the sort of progressive movement, we became absolutist. And we forgot that in a democracy, we have to, one, grapple with where the public authentically is and actually engage with it. And I think, you know, and part of this is fostered by social media. We sort of decided that we now have to say and fight for and push for every single perfect policy and cultural norm right now, regardless of whether the public is ready.

• 10:19Sarah McBride?

  And I think it misunderstands the role that politicians and frankly, social movements have in maintaining proximity to public opinion of walking people to a place. We should be ahead of public opinion, but we have to be within arms' reach. If we get too far out ahead, we lose our grip on public opinion and we can no longer bring it with us. And I think a lot of the conversations around sports and also some of the sort of cultural changes that we saw in expected workplace behavior, et cetera, was the byproduct of maybe just getting too far out ahead and not actually engaging in the art of social change making.

• 10:57Ezra Klein?

  The position for more maximalist demands is one that you need to be in a hurry. Trans people are dying now, suffering now, and that there isn't time for decades of political organizing here. And also that maybe it works, right? Or maybe there's a reason to believe it works. So you've been in more of those spaces than me. How would you describe how the sort of more maximalist approach and culture evolved? And why?

• 11:25Sarah McBride?

  Well, first off, I think you're right. It is understandable. I mean, this is a scary moment. I'm scared as a trans person. I am scared. And I recognize that when the house is on fire, when there are attacks that are dangerous, very dangerous, that it can feel like we need to scream and we need to sound the alarm and we need everyone to be doing exactly that. I get that instinct. I understand that people would say, if you give a little bit here, they'll take a mile. We're not negotiating with the other side, though. In this moment, we have to negotiate with public opinion.

• 12:08Sarah McBride?

  And we shouldn't treat the public like they're Republican politicians. And when you recognize that distinction, I think it allows for a pragmatic approach that has the best, in my mind, the best possible chance of shifting public opinion as quickly as possible. It would be one thing if screaming about how dangerous this is right now had the effect of stopping these attacks.

• 12:43Sarah McBride?

  But it won't.

• 12:45Ezra Klein?

  You call it a sort of abandonment of persuasion.

• 12:49Sarah McBride?

  Yes.

• 12:49Ezra Klein?

  It became true across a variety of issues, for progressives, also for people on the right. And sometimes I wonder how much that reflected the movement of politics to these very unusually designed platforms of speech, where what you do really is not talk to people you disagree with. It's talk about people you disagree with, to people you agree with, and then see whether or not they agree with what you said.

• 13:22Ezra Klein?

  And there's a way in which I think that breeds very different habits in the people who do it.

• 13:27Sarah McBride?

  I think that that's absolutely right. I mean, again, we're not in this place because of our community or our movement, but clearly we weren't, we aren't in this place because we weren't shaming people enough, because we weren't canceling people enough, because we weren't yelling at people enough, because we weren't denouncing anti-trans positions enough. I think the dynamic with social media is that the most outrageous, the most extreme, the most condemnatory content is what gets amplified the most, it's what gets liked and retweeted the most, and people mistake getting likes and retweets as a sign of effectiveness. And those are two fundamentally different things.

• 14:07Sarah McBride?

  And I think that whether it's subconscious or even conscious rewarding of unproductive conversations has completely undermined the capacity for us as individuals, or politically, for us to have conversations that persuade, that open people's hearts and minds, that meet them where they are. And I think the other dynamic that we have with social media is that there's sort of two kinds of people on social media. The vast majority of people are doom scrollers. They just go on and they scroll their social media. 20% maybe are doom posters, 10% on the far right, 10% on the far left. The people who are so strident and angry that they're compelled to post, and that content

• 14:52Sarah McBride?

  gets elevated. But what that has resulted in, for the 80% who are just doom scrollers, is this false perception of reality. Take a person, let's say they're center-left, and it gives them a false perception of everyone on the left believes this, and it pulls them that way, and then it gives them a false perception that everyone on the right believes the most extreme version of the right. And it creates this false, binary, extreme perception of availability bias, because all of the content we're seeing is reflective of just the 20%. And it's warped our perception of reality, it's warped our perception of who people are and where the public is. One of the best things about being an elected official is that I have to break out of that

• 15:34Sarah McBride?

  social media echo chamber, that social media extreme world, and interact with everyday people. And you see, yeah, there are real disagreements, but that 80% of the doom scrollers, or the people who aren't even on social media... Are actually in a place where we can have a conversation with them.

• 15:54Ezra Klein?

  When I ask this question, I don't just mean on trans issues, but you represent Delaware, which is a blue state, not Massachusetts blue, but blue. If you took your sense of what Democrats want or what the country wants from your experiences in social media versus your sense from traveling around your state, how would they differ?

• 16:21Sarah McBride?

  I think they would differ in two ways. One, they would differ in the issues that we would focus on, right? What you hear on social media is a preoccupation with sort of the most inflamed cultural war issues that you almost never hear when you're out talking to voters in any part of the state. What you hear is a understandable catastrophizing around democracy, which you don't hear nearly as much when you're out talking to voters. What you hear when you're talking to voters is you hear about the cost of living. You hear about the bread and butter issues that are keeping people up at night, people who aren't on social media or aren't posting on social media.

• 17:06Sarah McBride?

  And so you hear a difference in priorities, but then you also hear a difference in approach. People are hungry for an approach that doesn't treat our fellow citizens as enemies, but rather treats our fellow citizens as neighbors, even if we disagree with them. An approach that's just, an approach that's filled with grace. And I think on social media, we have come to this conclusion, rightfully so, that people's grace has been abused in our society, that the grace of marginalized people, the patience of marginalized people has been abused, and that is true. But on social media, the course correction to that has been to eliminate all grace from our politics.

• 17:49Sarah McBride?

  It's how dare you have conversations with people who disagree with you? How dare you be willing to work with people who disagree with you? How dare you compromise? How dare you seek to find common ground with Republicans? And I think when you go out into the real world, Democrats, independents, and Republicans, there is a hunger for some level of grace, for us to just not be so angry at one another and miserable. They want to see and know that we actually do have more in common. And therefore, it gives you hope that persuasion is not only necessary, but can actually still be effective.

• 18:30Ezra Klein?

  What does grace in politics mean to you? And when have you either seen it or experienced it?

• 18:37Sarah McBride?

  I think grace in politics means,

• 18:43Sarah McBride?

  one, creating room for disagreement, assuming good intentions, assuming that the people who are on the other side of an issue from you aren't automatically hateful, horrible people. I think it means creating some space for disagreement within your own coalition. I think it's a kindness that just feels so missing from our body politic and our national dialogue. And look, I saw it in the Delaware State Senate, on both sides of the aisle, whether it's in Republicans in Delaware joining on to be cosponsors on an LGBTQ panic defense bill that I was the prime sponsor of,

• 19:27Sarah McBride?

  whether it was the discourse being much kinder and more civil on a whole host of even cultural war issues. I saw that grace have the effect of lowering the temperature, removing some of the incentives to go after vulnerable people in this country, in our state. I saw it with my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle, who didn't vote for bills that were deeply personal to me. And yet, we still found ways to work together. We still found ways to develop friendships. And look, I know that that places more of a burden on me than it does on them.

• 20:11Sarah McBride?

  Right? I know that when you're asking a marginalized person to extend grace in a conversation, you're asking much more of that marginalized person.

• 20:22Sarah McBride?

  But change making isn't always easy and it's not always fair. And why would we expect that the extra burdens and barriers of marginalization would cease at the point of overcoming the marginalization, of creating the change necessary to eliminate prejudice and create equal opportunity in our society? No, that's where the barriers are going to be greatest. That's where the burdens are going to be greatest.

• 20:45Ezra Klein?

  It reminds me of a line that I feel, I hear it less now, but I used to see it a lot, which is, "It's not my job to educate you."

• 20:56Sarah McBride?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:58Ezra Klein?

  And I always thought about that line because on one level, I understood it. I mean, it's probably not your job to educate anyone. And then if you're in politics, if what you're trying to do is political change, I always found that line to be almost anti-political.

• 21:10Sarah McBride?

  Yeah.

• 21:11Ezra Klein?

  Right? That if what you want to do is change a law, change a society, change a heart, and you're the one who wants to do it, well, then whose job is it? And who are you expecting to do it?

• 21:26Sarah McBride?

  It's an understandable frustration, but it's the only way forward. And look, I don't believe that every person from an underrepresented or an unrepresented community needs to always bear the brunt and burden of public education, right? Like, I don't believe that every LGBTQ person has to be out and sharing their story and doing all of that hard work. But for the folks who are willing to do it, we need to let them. And one of the problems we've had is that we've gone from, "It's not my job as an individual person who's just trying to make it through the day to educate everyone," to "No one from that community should educate."

• 22:11Sarah McBride?

  And frankly, we should just stop having this conversation because the fact that we are having this conversation at all is hurtful and oppressive. And maybe it is hurtful, but...

• 22:25Sarah McBride?

  You can't foster social change if you don't have a conversation. You can't change people if you exclude them. And I will just say, you can't have absolutism on the left or the right without authoritarianism. Right? The fact that we have real disagreements, the fact that we have difficult conversations, the fact that we have painful conversations is not a bug of democracy. It's a feature of democracy. And yes, that is hard and difficult. But again, how can we expect that the process of overcoming marginalization is going to be fair? And I think the discourse has taken this understandable critique of society and the

• 23:09Sarah McBride?

  way we operate and the burdens we place on marginalized people. And we've somehow said, well, the one place that we have control over whether we allow for that marginalization is in the strategies we use to overcome it. And so we're not going to engage in that because it's sort of self oppression. And I think that is such a self defeating and counterproductive approach.

• 23:30Ezra Klein?

  I've been thinking in the past couple of months because we are in the most illiberal era of my lifetime in American politics. I don't mean liberalism in the sense of supporting or not supporting universal health care, but in terms of due process, in terms of tolerance, in terms of the basic practice of politics and living amidst each other. And it's also made me think about the need to clearly define what the practice of liberalism itself is. What do you think it is?

• 24:03Sarah McBride?

  I think it is the recognition that in a free society, we are going to live and think differently. I think it is the allowance of that disagreement in the public square and the tussle of that disagreement in the public square. And that is uncomfortable. That is not easy. And yes, there are going to be people in that conversation for whom it's going to be more difficult and more uncomfortable. But In the internet world, you can't suppress diversity of thought.

• 24:44Sarah McBride?

  It will always bubble up, but it will bubble up if suppressed with an extra bitterness and an extremism fostered in that echo chamber that it's been suppressed to. It'll inevitably bubble up like a volcano. And I think that's what we're seeing right now. I will say, I think while the left made this mistake of fostering an illiberalism based on a sort of false sense of cultural victory, I think now the right is making the exact same mistake. I think they're overplaying their hand. I think they're interpreting the 2024 election to be a cultural mandate that is much greater than what it actually is. And I think that if they continue to do that, there will be a backlash to the illiberalism,

• 25:29Sarah McBride?

  the cultural illiberalism, not just the legal illiberalism, the cultural illiberalism of the right, in the same way that there's been a backlash to the cultural illiberalism of the left.

• 25:37Ezra Klein?

  I couldn't, I think, agree with that more. We're going to get to that. I want to talk for a minute about the 2024 election and the aftermath. So there's been a lot of rethinking and self-recrimination among Democrats. One of the comments that got a lot of attention came right after the election when Seth Moulton, who is your colleague, Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts, said, quote, "Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I'm supposed to be afraid to say that." What did you think when you heard that?

• 26:19Sarah McBride?

  One, that it wasn't the language that I would use. But I think it came from a larger belief that the Democratic Party needed to start to have an open conversation about our illiberalism, that we needed to recognize that we were talking to ourselves. We were fighting fights that felt viscerally comforting to our own base, or fighting fights in a way that felt viscerally comforting to our own base, rather than maintaining proximity to the public and being normal people. The sports conversation is a good one because I think...

• 27:06Sarah McBride?

  You know, there is, there is, there's a big difference between banning trans young people from extracurricular programs consistent with their gender identity, and recognizing that there's room for nuance in this conversation. And I think the notion that we created this all-on or all-off mentality, that you had to be perfect on trans rights across the board, use exactly the right language, and unless you do that, you're a bigot. You're an enemy. And when you create a binary all-on or all-off option for people, you're gonna have a lot of imperfect allies who are gonna inevitably choose the all-off option. And what ends up happening is the left excommunicates,

• 27:51Sarah McBride?

  well, will excommunicate someone who, not only Seth voted against the ban on trans athletes, but we would excommunicate someone who uses imperfect language. Yes, look, again, not language I would use, but we would excommunicate someone who's saying that there's nuance in this conversation and uses language that we don't approve of, yet still votes, quote, "the right way", is exactly what's wrong with our approach. And look, Seth's not going anywhere, but for a lot of everyday folks, if they think how Seth thinks, or if they think that there's room for nuance in this conversation, and we tell them, "You're a bigot. You're not welcomed here. You're not part of our coalition.

• 28:34Sarah McBride?

  We will not consider you an ally", the right's done a very good job of saying, "Listen, you have violated the illiberalism of the left. You have been cast aside for your common sense. Welcome into our club." And then human nature starts to be, once you then get welcomed into that club, human nature is, well, I was with the Democratic Party on 90% of things, maybe against them on 10% of things, or, or sort of in the middle on 10%. Once you get welcomed into that other club, Human psychology is you start to adopt those positions. And instead of being with us on 90% of things and against us on 10% of things, that person now welcomed into the far right club starts to be against us on 90% of things and with us on only 10% of things.

• 29:17Sarah McBride?

  And I think that that dynamic is part of the regression that we have seen. And not only the regression we've seen, but the hardening of the opposition that we've seen on trans issues. We have been an exclusionary tent that is shedding imperfect allies, which is great. We're going to have a really, really miserable, self-righteous, morally pure club in the Gulag we've all been sent off to.

• 29:40Ezra Klein?

  I think this goes to your point in a way. So after he made those comments, the Times reported that a local party official and an ally had compared him to a Nazi cooperator. There were protests outside his office. I was always struck by which part of his comments got all that attention. It was a part I just read to you, but he'd also said this. Having reasonable restrictions for safety and competitive fairness in sports seems like, well, it's very empirically a majority opinion. He's right on that. But should we take civil rights away from trans people so they can just get fired for being who they are? No. He was expressing opposition to what was about to be Donald Trump's agenda.

• 30:22Sarah McBride?

  Yeah.

• 30:24Ezra Klein?

  And this space of his divergence from an already, an issue that had already been lost, you know, the polling was terrible on it. That was where people on the left focused. And his expression of support and allyship, as I saw, barely ever got reported or commented on. It struck me as telling.

• 30:48Sarah McBride?

  I think it absolutely is telling and I think it's.

• 30:54Sarah McBride?

  The best thing for trans people in this moment is for all of us to wake up to the fact that we have to grapple with the world as it is, that we have to grapple with where public opinion is right now, and that we need all of the allies that we can get. Because if you, again, Seth voted against the bans. If we are going to defend some of the basic fundamental rights of trans people, we are going to need those individuals in our coalition. If you have to be perfect on every trans rights issue for us to say,

• 31:36Sarah McBride?

  "You can be an ally and part of our coalition," then we're going to have a cap of about 30% on our coalition. If we are going to have 50% plus one, or frankly, more necessarily, 60% or more in support of nondiscrimination protections for trans people, in support of our ability to get the healthcare that we need, by definition, it will have to include a portion of the 70% who oppose trans people's participation in sports. And right now, the message from so many is, "You're not welcome." And your support for 90% of these policies is irrelevant. The fact that you diverge on one thing makes you evil. And

• 32:21Sarah McBride?

  it also misunderstands the history of civil rights in this country. I mean, "You can't compromise on civil rights" is a great tweet, but tell me, which Civil Rights Act delivered all progress and all civil rights for people of color in this country? The Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, or any of the civil rights acts that have been passed since the 1960s? That movement was disciplined, it was strategic, it picked its battles, it picked its fights, and it compromised to move the ball forward. And right now, that compromise would be deemed unprincipled, weak, and throwing everyone

• 33:06Sarah McBride?

  under the bus. And that is...

• 33:10Sarah McBride?

  That is so counterproductive, it is so harmful, and it completely betrays the lessons of every single social movement and civil rights movement in our country's history. And we have an example of a very successful social movement in recent history with marriage equality. Where would we have been in 2007 and 2008 if not only we had not tolerated the fact that Barack Obama was ostensibly not for marriage equality then, but if we had said to voters, even if you vote against the marriage ban but aren't quite comfortable with marriage yet, that you're a bigot and you don't belong in our coalition? Where would that movement have been?

• 33:53Sarah McBride?

  The most effective messengers were the people who had evolved themselves. We had grace personified in that movement, and it worked beyond even the advocates' wildest expectations in terms of the speed of both legal progress and cultural progress. Because we created incentives for people to grow, we created space for people to grow, and we allowed people into our tent, into that conversation, who weren't already with us.

• 34:23Ezra Klein?

  You mentioned the period in 2008 when Barack Obama was running for president. And at the very least, his public position, many of us suspected it was not his private position, but his public position was that he opposed gay marriage. That was the mainstream position at that point in the Democratic Party. And there was a compromise position they all supported, which was civil unions. Is there an analogy to the civil unions debate or position for you now?

• 34:52Sarah McBride?

  I think on the sports conversation, it's local control. It's allowing for individual athletic associations to make those individual determinations. And in some cases, they'll have policies that strike a right balance. In some cases, they'll have policies that are too restrictive.

• 35:12Sarah McBride?

  And I think that that is the equivalent to the civil unions position in that debate. By allowing for Democratic voters, independent voters, hell, even some elected officials, to take that civil unions position, one that met voters where they were, it gave some of our politicians who needed it, an off-ramp, so that they didn't have to choose between being all on or all off. And it allowed that conversation to continue and prevented more harm from being inflicted.

• 36:12Ezra Klein?

  I want to pick up on the polling. So there's this YouGov polling from January that looked at all these different issues. And there are a lot of issues around trans rights that actually poll great.

• 36:25Sarah McBride?

  Yes.

• 36:25Ezra Klein?

  So, protection from trans people against hate crimes, plus 36 net approval. Banning employers from firing trans people because of their identity, plus 33. Allowing transgender people to serve in the military, which Donald Trump is trying to rescind, plus 22. Requiring all new public buildings to include gender-neutral bathrooms, this surprised me, plus 7. Then there's the other side. Everybody knows that the sports issue is tough in the polling. But banning people under 18 from attending drag shows, that's popular. Banning youth from accessing puberty blockers and hormones, that's very popular. Banning public schools from teaching lessons on transgender issues, that's popular. Requiring transgender people

• 37:06Ezra Klein?

  to use bathrooms that match their biological sex, that is popular. When you look at these lists of issues, what do you see as dividing them? What cuts the issues that you could win on now? From those that have heavy disapproval.

• 37:23Sarah McBride?

  Well, I think that there's very clearly a distinction that the public makes between young people and adults. I think that there is a distinction that is made in many cases when it comes to what people feel like is government support of or funding of versus just allowing trans people to live their lives, allowing trans troops who are qualified to continue to serve, allowing trans people who are doing great jobs in their workplace to continue to work. It all goes back to this notion of get government out, let people live their lives, and let families and individuals make the best decisions for themselves. And I think that that should be the through line of our perspective, a libertarian approach

• 38:05Sarah McBride?

  to allowing trans people to live, live fully and freely, that there are some complicated questions, but that those questions shouldn't be answered by politicians who are trying to exploit those issues for political gain.

• 38:18Ezra Klein?

  I was struck by your use of the word libertarian there. Because when I look at this polling, what I see is something quite similar, which is Americans by and large aren't cruel. And their view here is pretty live and let live.

• 38:34Sarah McBride?

  Yes.

• 38:35Ezra Klein?

  They have different views, which we can talk about in a minute on minors. But where the question is the government coming in and bothering you, you being any trans person, they don't really want that. What they don't want to do is change their lives, or think something is changing for them in their society. And maybe those two things are not in all ways possible, certainly over the long term. But there are a lot of places where they are possible. It seems to me that in 2024, in the last couple of years, what Republicans did very well, their approach to persuasion, was to pick the right wedge issues. And you would think that the entire debate over trans policy in America was about NCAA swimmers.

• 39:20Ezra Klein?

  Like, this was the biggest problem facing trans people, the biggest problem in some ways facing the country, when it's a pretty edge case issue. And questions like nondiscrimination and access to healthcare are much more widespread.

• 39:38Ezra Klein?

  But what they did was they use their wedge issue and they're now attacking those majority positions, right? Trump is attacking discrimination, right? He wants people discriminated against. He doesn't want trans people to be able to put the identity they hold and present as on their passports. Not a huge winning issue for him. And so there's this question of picking the right wedge issues. Is there a wedge issue for you that you wish Democrats would pick?

• 40:04Sarah McBride?

  Well, listen, I think that we do much better when we keep the main thing, the main thing. Defending Medicaid in this moment is the main thing.

• 40:18Ezra Klein?

  For everybody?

• 40:19Sarah McBride?

  For everyone, for everyone. And look, I think abortion, to some degree, had been a wedge issue that was to the Democrats' advantage, not to the Republicans' advantage. But I think we have to reorient the public's perception of what our priorities are as a party. And I think when we lean into the cultural wars and lean into cultural wedge issues, even if they benefit us, they reinforce a perception that the Democratic Party is unconcerned with the economic needs of the American people. When you ask a voter, what are the top five priorities of the Democratic Party? What are the top five priorities of the Republican Party? And what are the top five priorities for them as a voter? Three

• 41:04Sarah McBride?

  out of the five issues that are the top issue for that voter appear in what their perception of the top five issues for the Republican Party. Only one of their top five priorities appear in their perception of what are the top five priorities for the Democrats. That's healthcare, and it was fifth out of five. The top two were abortion and LGBTQ issues. And I don't care what your position is on those two issues. You are not going to win an election if voters think that those two issues are your top issues, rather than their ability to get a good wage and good benefits, get a house, and live the American dream.

• 41:42Sarah McBride?

  And I think we have to, in this moment, reinforce what is our actual priority as a party, which is making sure that everyone can pursue the American dream, which has become increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible. That everyone should be able to get the healthcare they need, be able to buy a home, be able to send their child to childcare without breaking the bank if they can even get a spot.

• 42:06Sarah McBride?

  That needs to be our focus. And I think when we have these sort of purity politics approach to LGBTQ issues or abortion, what we communicate, even if we're not talking about those issues, is we communicate those are threshold issues and therefore the voter reads that as those are priority issues. And the only way to convince the voter that those are not our priority issues, that that's not what we're spending our capital and time on, but rather giving them healthcare and housing, is to make it abundantly clear to people that our tent can include diversity of thought on those issues.

• 42:43Ezra Klein?

  Something that I notice in the broad coalition of groups and people and funders who identify as or support Democrats is that they all want the issue they care most about to be the issue that gets talked about the most. People who fund anything from climate to trans rights to all kinds of the hotter issues in American life. You could actually imagine a strategy where those groups and that money went to making every election about Medicaid because Medicaid is just a killer issue for Democrats. And then the people get elected are better on those other issues, too. But it doesn't.

• 43:27Ezra Klein?

  That money, those groups that are organizing, what they often want Democrats to do is publicly take unpopular positions on their issues. I think all the time about the ACLU questionnaire that asked candidates, and in this case Kamala Harris, whether she would support the government paying for gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants in prison. Even if your whole position in life, your point, is to make that possible, the last thing you would want is for anybody to claim it out in public, right? You would want nobody to ever think about that question ever at all.

• 44:10Ezra Klein?

  And it's something I've heard Democrats talking about more after the election, just rethinking on some level. This question of, is the point of all this organizing to get politicians to commit to the most maximalist version of your issue set? Or is the point of this organizing to somehow figure out how to win Senate seats in Missouri and Kansas? So you have very, very, very moderate Democrats who nevertheless make Chuck Schumer the Senate Majority Leader rather than John Thune.

• 44:44Sarah McBride?

  Right. I think that there is an incentive from money and from social media, and those also go hand in hand sometimes with grassroots donations, that incentivize the groups to want to show their influence and their effect by having politicians fight the fights that they want them to fight in ways that feel viscerally comforting to their own community that they're representing. And, look, I get that. I understand that. One, we have to be better as elected officials in saying no, in saying, "Public opinion is

• 45:28Sarah McBride?

  everything." And if you want us to change, you need to help foster the change in public opinion before you're asking these elected officials to betray the fact that they are, at the end of the day, representatives that have to represent in some form or fashion the views of the people that they represent. Because at some point, you will represent the people's positions, or they will find someone else who will. And so it is just an unsustainable dynamic for the groups to continue to ask elected officials to take these maximalist positions, to ignore where their voters are.

• 46:12Sarah McBride?

  They have to do the hard work of persuasion. And there's always going to be a tension between the groups and elected officials. Everyone has to do their own job, but there has to be some degree of understanding.

• 46:23Ezra Klein?

  How do you hold that tension? I always think this is such an interesting question for politicians to work with, because there is the internal and the external push to authenticity.

• 46:36Sarah McBride?

  Yeah.

• 46:37Ezra Klein?

  We don't want these poll-tested politicians.

• 46:38Sarah McBride?

  Yeah.

• 46:39Ezra Klein?

  And it's also your job to represent.

• 46:41Sarah McBride?

  Yes.

• 46:42Ezra Klein?

  On issues personal to you, on issues not as personal to you. How do you think about balancing they elected you versus you are their servant?

• 46:54Sarah McBride?

  Yeah. Look, all of these decisions inevitably require a balancing of my own views, my own principles, and the views of the people that I represent. But I think one thing you always have to do is you have to go, okay, here's an issue that I feel very strongly about. I vote against this. What are the second, third, and fourth order consequences of voting against or voting in favor? You might abstractly agree with something as an ideal, but if you were to pursue that or implement that policy, it would have, in the medium to long term, a regressive effect because there's a backlash to pushing too hard or taking too maximalist of

• 47:39Sarah McBride?

  a position by the mainstream in our politics. One of the problems we've had is that we have said, not only you have to vote the way we want you to vote, but then you have to speak the way we want you to speak. And I always have said, even when I was an advocate, if we can get the policy vote that we want and the compromise we are accepting is essentially a rhetorical compromise, that is a pretty darn good deal. And again, I think we have to be willing to have these conversations out in the open. We have to recognize that there's complexity, there's nuance, and that means not just in the policy space, but in the political space. And that's authentic. To say, these are some really difficult conversations, and sometimes I'm going to get it right, and sometimes I'm going to get it wrong. And sometimes

• 48:25Sarah McBride?

  I'm voting exclusively with what I think is the right thing to do, even if my voters disagree. But also, sometimes I'm going to have to take a balanced view of this. And that's democracy.

• 48:37Ezra Klein?

  I want to pick up on speech.

• 48:40Ezra Klein?

  It's true on transgender issues. It's also true on a bunch of other issues in the past couple of years, that a huge number of the fights that ended up defining the issue were not about legislation, they were about speech. I've always myself sort of thought this reflects social media. But I mean, the number of people who've talked to me about the term birthing persons, which I think virtually nobody has used, or Latinx was a big one like this. There is, in general, this extreme weighting of can you push changes of speech onto the

• 49:23Ezra Klein?

  people who agree with you and possibly onto society as a whole? And that the strategy worked backwards from the speech outcome, not the legislative outcome. How do you think about that weighting of speech versus votes?

• 49:41Sarah McBride?

  I think, look, there is no question in my mind that the vote is much more important than the rhetoric that they use. We have sort of discoursed our way into like, if you talk about this issue in a way that's suboptimal from my perspective, you're actually laying the foundation for oppression and persecution. And I just think like, maybe academically that's true, but welcome to the real world. We are prioritizing the wrong thing. And it's an element of sort of virtue signaling. Like, I'm showing that I am the most radical, I'm the most progressive on this issue, because

• 50:25Sarah McBride?

  I'm going to take this person who does everything right substantively and crucify this person for not being perfect in language. It's a way of demonstrating that you're in the in-group, that you understand the language, that you understand the mores and the values of that group, and it's a way of building capital and credibility with that in-group. I think that's what it is. And I just think it's like, it's inherently exclusionary, and I think that that's part of the thing that's wrong with our politics right now, which is that all of our politics feels so exclusionary. The coalition that wins, the argument about who is most welcoming, will be the coalition that wins our politics.

• 51:01Ezra Klein?

  I think that's such an interesting point, and I think probably true.

• 51:07Ezra Klein?

  I'd also be curious to your thoughts on this. I think there's a very interesting way that that speech and its political power confuse people because it's two things at once. It's extremely low cost and extremely high cost. So pronouns, for instance, I think are correctly. It's a very, very easy thing. And basically, if you won't use somebody's preferred pronouns, I think you're an asshole. That's my personal view of it. But trying to execute a speech change where everybody lists their pronouns in their bio, where every meeting begins with people going around the circle and saying their name and their pronouns, that feels very different to people. It seems small, right? I mean, you don't have to pay anything out of pocket, right?

• 51:52Ezra Klein?

  You don't have to go anywhere. And yet, the language we use is very, very important to us.

• 51:57Sarah McBride?

  Yeah. I think you're absolutely right there. And I think the thing with pronouns, too, is a prime example of where we've lost grace, though.

• 52:06Ezra Klein?

  Because people, assholes, it's not graceful.

• 52:08Sarah McBride?

  Well, no, no. I think there is a difference between someone who's intentionally misgendering, someone who makes mistakes. And I think that there has been, whether warranted or not, the perception that people are going to be shamed if they make mistakes. But then I think you're absolutely right, too, that there is a distinction between treating me the way I want to be treated and everyone changing their behavior and sort of requiring this sort of, again, in-group language that exceeds just calling the person in front of you what they want to be called.

• 52:46Ezra Klein?

  And I think it gets to something we were talking about earlier, which is a way, there are two pieces to the politics of this, and one is fairly popular, at least for now, and the other is a much tougher lift, which is, I think, most people have that basic sense of politeness. If you want to be referred to in a certain way, yes, I might slip up. But, you know, if I'm being a decent person, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try.

• 53:08Sarah McBride?

  Yeah.

• 53:09Ezra Klein?

  Versus the move around pronouns to, you know, the move for calling, you know, things cisgender, that was a much bigger effort than in some ways wasn't described as such. And I feel like there's been a dimension of the politics here where...

• 53:28Ezra Klein?

  Things that were very academic arguments became political arguments. And then people were a little bit unclear on what the political win would be. To destabilize the fundamental gender binary that people understand is operating is touching something very deep in society versus treating other people with respect and courtesy and decency and grace

• 53:52Sarah McBride?

  Yeah.

• 53:53Ezra Klein?

  is a much easier sell. And I think it's okay to want to do the former. But I think people kept mixing up which their actual project was.

• 54:04Sarah McBride?

  At the end of the day, the thing that we lost is that we're just talking about people trying to live their lives, trying to live the best lives they can. We got into this rabbit hole of academic intellectual discourse that doesn't actually matter in people's lives. We got into this performative fighting to show our bona fides to our in-group. And we lost the fundamental truth that all of those things are only even possible once you've done the basic legwork

• 54:47Sarah McBride?

  of allowing people to see trans people as people. When you allow trans people to be seen as human beings who have the same hopes and dreams and fears as everyone else, once that basic conception of humanity exists, then all the other things, all the other conversations sort of fall into place. Language inevitably changes across society, across cultures, across time, but it is a byproduct of cultural change. And I just think we started to have what maybe were conversations that were happening in academic institutions or conversations that were happening in the community.

• 55:31Sarah McBride?

  And we started having those out in public on social media and then demand that everyone else has that conversation with us and then incorporates what the dominant position is in that conversation and the way they live their lives. And it's just like, that's not how this happens. Let's just talk about human beings who want you to live by the golden rule.

• 55:51Sarah McBride?

  Let's just talk about the fact that trans people are people who can be service members and doctors and lawyers and educators and elected officials and do a damn good job in that. That is the gateway to everything else, and it has always been in every social movement.

• 56:37Ezra Klein?

  The place where it is complicated and the place where, not just the politics, but I think the answers are complicated, is around children. And we talked about the NCAA swimmers and the edge case nature of that. But schools are broader. And a lot of what the Trump administration is doing, a lot of what you see Republicans doing in states, is around schools and minors. And that's tougher. Parents want to know what their kids are doing. On the one hand, if you're a kid with gender dysphoria and taking puberty blockers early matters. On the other hand, there are a lot of things parents don't let their kids do young because they're not sure what they're going to want in a couple of years.

• 57:19Ezra Klein?

  How do you think about that set of issues? The sort of leave them alone makes a lot of sense for adults. But we don't leave kids alone. Kids exist in a sort of paternalist system where their parents have power over them, their schools have power over them. And so the question of policy there becomes very profound.

• 57:39Sarah McBride?

  Yeah. I think, first off, I think in that instance, we acknowledge the, and rightfully acknowledge the important role that parents play in decisions for their children. Look, you can recognize that there's nuance here. You can say that there need to be stronger standards of care, that maybe things got too lenient. But ultimately, politicians aren't the people who should be making these decisions.

• 58:11Sarah McBride?

  The family should be making these decisions. The family in consultation with a doctor should be making these decisions. And I think that that is a fair balance in recognizing the need for every child to get medical care and also the right of parents to make decisions, including healthcare decisions for their children.

• 58:34Ezra Klein?

  But you do see right now in some European countries, the government setting tighter standards. There have definitely been a lot of arguments about whether or not the research was good, whether or not the research was ideologically influenced. So there's some government role here, some role for professional associations, some context in which families and doctors make these decisions. What is that role?

• 58:55Sarah McBride?

  Well, I think you just hit on that distinction, which is that in many European countries, the distinction between the sort of healthcare system and the government is fuzzier. In many cases, you have government operated hospitals. Here, you have healthcare systems. You have standards of care developed by providers in those medical associations. And that is where those decisions should be left up to in terms of establishing the standards of care. And then when applying those standards of care, allowing those, the application, the practical application of those standards of care

• 59:37Sarah McBride?

  to happen between patients, families and providers, because it's fundamentally a different kind of system.

• 59:44Ezra Klein?

  I think the critique, the fear of the right that I hear, that some of these same dynamics towards pushing out people who question the evidence, towards there being things you can say and things you cannot say to cold, and that the results of that can't be trusted, that everything you said is happening in politics is also happening.

• 1:00:10Ezra Klein?

  In medicine and elsewhere.

• 1:00:12Sarah McBride?

  I think that we actually started to see a pretty difficult but important conversation within WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, about the standards of care for youth care before government started intervening, where they started having a conversation about how to adjust the standards of care, recognizing perhaps that they needed to tighten them. And that's true across healthcare. I mean, standards of care across different forms of care are constantly evolving. That conversation was starting to happen. You cannot tell me that it's the role of the government to preempt those conversations. Those conversations

• 1:00:53Sarah McBride?

  should not be settled in legislative bodies by politicians who aren't looking at the data, don't understand the data, and certainly aren't objectively interpreting the data. And, look, I think all of this changes, though. The conversation changes, I should say, when people understand what it means to be trans. Because I think right now, we think of it as a choice. We think of it as an intellectual decision, right? Like, I want to be a girl. I want to be a boy. And I want to do this because of these rewards, or I don't want to do it because of these risks. That's not what gender identity is. It is much more

• 1:01:36Sarah McBride?

  innate. It is a visceral feeling. It's not the same as whether you get a tattoo or what you have for dinner. It's not a decision. It's a fact about who you are. And I think the challenge in the conversation around gender identity that differs from sexual orientation is that most people who are straight can understand what it feels like to love and to lust. And so they're able to enter into conversations around sexual orientation with an analogous experience. And the challenge in the conversation around gender identity is that people who aren't trans don't know what it feels like to have a gender identity that differs from your sex assigned at birth. For me, the closest thing that I can compare

• 1:02:16Sarah McBride?

  it to was a constant feeling of homesickness. Just an unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that would only go away when I could be seen and affirmed as myself. And I think that because we stopped having that conversation, because we we stopped creating space for people to to ask questions, for people's understandable, perhaps invasive, but understandable curiosity, to be met with an openness and a grace, not by everyone, but just the people who were willing to do it.

• 1:02:51Sarah McBride?

  We stopped people having an understanding of what it means to be trans, and it allowed them to start to see it. Or it allowed for their preexisting perception that this is some sort of intellectual choice to manifest. And in some cases, the perfect, quote, discourse started to reinforce that.

• 1:03:09Sarah McBride?

  Right?

• 1:03:09Ezra Klein?

  To how?

• 1:03:11Sarah McBride?

  That like, we started to get to this place where you couldn't be like, I'm born this way. Right? That we policed the way even LGBTQ people or trans people talked about their own identities to be this perfect sort of academic.

• 1:03:28Ezra Klein?

  Why couldn't you say, I'm born this way?

• 1:03:29Sarah McBride?

  Because it was, I'm not.

• 1:03:32Ezra Klein?

  No, no, I'm not saying you're saying it, but I, this is a thing I've not been aware of.

• 1:03:36Sarah McBride?

  There was sort of an academic perception of like, every, people have different.

• 1:03:43Sarah McBride?

  People should have agency over their sexual orientation and gender identity, even if it's not, quote, innate. And that there was this sort of acceptance of a sort of mainstream perception of sexual orientation and gender identity that was a one-size-fits-all narrative around LGBTQ people that didn't necessarily include people whose understanding was more fluid or their understanding evolved over time, or for whom they they feel like they want to transgress gender norms because of a reason that's not this sort of innate sense of gender. And I think when you take that.

• 1:04:31Sarah McBride?

  Capacity for us to authentically talk about our experience away from us, because it's not sort of academically the purist that creates space and room for every single different lived experience within that umbrella. You give people justification to say, or think, this is a choice. And if it's a choice, the threshold to allow for discrimination becomes lower.

• 1:04:58Ezra Klein?

  I've known a number of people who've transitioned as adults. And the degree to which most of us avoid doing anything that would cause us any social discomfort at all times is so profound. How much we live our lives trying to not make anybody look at us for too long, that it's always struck me as it must be such a profound need to make that decision, to come to your family, to your wife, or your husband, to your kids, to your parents. And so the sort of right wing meme that emerged around it, that people are transitioning because they opportunistically want to be in another bathroom.

• 1:05:39Sarah McBride?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:40Ezra Klein?

  Or another locker room. Or get a, some kind of cultural affirmative action, always struck me as not just absurd, but deeply unempathic. Like not thinking for a moment what it must mean to want that that much.

• 1:06:05Ezra Klein?

  And so then it's interesting to hear you say that there was almost like a pincer movement on that.

• 1:06:11Ezra Klein?

  Because it hasn't struck me as a thing people, I mean, I'm sure there is agency and people make decisions here. But the pull from inside of everybody I've known is really profound. Usually they've been trying to choose the other way for a long time. And eventually just can't anymore.

• 1:06:29Sarah McBride?

  That's exactly what my experience was. You know, it's funny because sometimes there's discourse that like, the only reason why I'm an elected official is because I'm trans. Like, I see on the right, this notion that I'm, you know, a diversity hire. It's like, well, voters chose me. It's kind of an insult to voters that they didn't choose me because they think that I'm the best qualified or best candidate or reflective of what they want. But they just chose me because of my identity. But it also just undersells such a larger truth, which is that my life would be so much easier if I wasn't trans. Now, I'm proud of who I am. I'm proud that this is my life experience for a whole host of reasons.

• 1:07:14Sarah McBride?

  But this is all a lot harder because I'm trans. Are there moments where I get a microphone? Or, you know, am I sitting here? Right? If I was a non-trans freshman Democrat, would I be sitting here? Maybe not. Maybe I would, maybe not. We probably would be having a different conversation. But navigating this world as a trans person has always been, and even more so now, it's incredibly hard. And all any of us are asking, or at least all that most of us are asking, is to just let us live the best life we can.

• 1:07:59Sarah McBride?

  A life with as few regrets as possible, a life where we can be constructive, productive, contributing members of society. You might not understand us. It is hard to step into the shoes of someone who was trans and to understand what that might feel like. But I spent 21 years of my life praying that this would go away.

• 1:08:23Sarah McBride?

  And the only way that I was finally able to accept it was, one, realizing this was never going to go away. Two, becoming so consumed by it that it was the only thing I really was able to think about because the pain became too all encompassing. And three, the only way I was able to come out was because I was able to accept that I was losing any future. I had to go through stages of grief. And the only way I was able to come out was to finally get to that stage of acceptance over a loss of any future. It's really scary and it's really hard. And right now, it is particularly scary and hard.

• 1:09:03Sarah McBride?

  And to your point earlier, most people are good people and they just want to treat other people with respect and kindness. But unfortunately, in this moment in our politics, we were recently at something where someone gave us some information and they said that when a voter was asked to describe the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, it was crazy for the Republican Party and preachy for the Democratic Party. I think that that undersells something that's more true, which is that a voter will look and say, "Republican Party are assholes to other people.

• 1:09:44Sarah McBride?

  I don't like that, but the Democratic Party is an asshole to me. And if I have to choose between the party that's an asshole to me because I'm not perfect or a party that's an asshole to someone else, even if I don't like it, I'm going to choose the party that's an asshole to someone else."

• 1:09:59Ezra Klein?

  When you entered Congress, you were quite directly targeted by some of your Republican colleagues, led by Nancy Mace, on which bathrooms you could use, a thing that would not have happened if you were not a trans legislator. And this is the majority party in the House. You have to work with these people, you're on committees with them. What has your experience been like? Both sort of absorbing that and then trying to work with people who may or may not have given you much grace in that moment.

• 1:10:34Sarah McBride?

  Well, the first thing I'd say is that the folks who were or are targeting me because of my gender identity in Congress, those are folks who, at this point, are really not really working with any Democrats and can barely work with their own Republican colleagues. I've introduced several bills, almost all have been bipartisan. I've been developing relationships with colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Part of my responsibility in this moment is to show that when someone like me gets elected to public office, we can do the whole job. And that means working with people who disagree with me, including on issues that are deeply personal.

• 1:11:17Sarah McBride?

  The folks who are coming after me, I mean, look, it's been hard. But I know, I know that they are coming after me not because they are deeply passionate about bathroom policy. They're coming after me because they are employing the strategies of reality TV. And the best way to get attention in a body of 435 people is to throw wine in someone's face. That gets you a little attention. But if that person that you're throwing wine in their face, if they respond by throwing wine in your face, it creates a beef, which gets you a season-long story arc.

• 1:12:01Sarah McBride?

  I knew that they were trying to bait me into a fight to get attention. And I refused to be used as a political pawn. I refused to give them not only the power of derailing me, but the incentive to continue to come after me. And this was a prime example. This was a prime example of how to fight smart that is demonized on our own side. Because the grace that I didn't get wasn't just on the right, there was a lot of critique on the left.

• 1:12:38Sarah McBride?

  And I understand when you're a first, people viscerally feel your highs and they also viscerally feel your lows. But what would me fighting back in that moment have done? It wouldn't have stopped the ban. And it would only have incentivized further attacks and continued behavior like that. And sometimes we have to understand that not fighting, not taking the bait, that's not a sign of weakness. It's not unprincipled. Discipline and strategy are signs of strength.

• 1:13:22Sarah McBride?

  And I think in the social media world, we have lulled ourselves into thinking the only way to fight is to fight. It's to scream and it's to yell and it's to do it on every instance. And anytime you don't do it, you're normalizing the behavior that's coming your way. Which is both a ridiculously unfair burden to place on every single human being to have to fight every single indignity. But by that logic, the young black students who were walking into a school that was being integrated in the late 50s and 60s, who were walking forward calmly and with dignity

• 1:14:07Sarah McBride?

  and grace into that school as people screamed slurs at them? By that definition, that student was normalizing those slurs by not responding. Instead, what that student was doing was providing the public with a very clear visual, a very clear contrast between unhinged hatred and basic dignity and grace, which is fundamental to humanity. And for me, one of the things that I struggled with after that was the lack of grace that I got from some in my own community who said that I was reinforcing the behavior of the people who were coming after me, that I was not responding appropriately to the bullying

• 1:14:52Sarah McBride?

  that I was facing, when the reality is... That behavior has diminished significantly because I removed the incentive for them to continue to do it, because the incentive was so blatantly about attention. And I wasn't going to let them get the attention that they wanted.

• 1:15:08Ezra Klein?

  You remind me of something I heard Barack Obama say many, many years ago, when he was getting criticized for trying to negotiate, trying to reach out to people who, by that point, many on the left, thought he was naive for trying to work with. And he said something like, that he had always felt that the American people could see better if the other side had clenched their fist, if he opened his hand. I thought there was a lot of wisdom in that.

• 1:15:42Sarah McBride?

  Yes. Yes, absolutely. Early on in those first few weeks, I had some folks text me, as I was responding the way that I was, and they said, "You should watch 42," which is the movie about Jackie Robinson, and I am not comparing my experience to Jackie Robinson at all, at all. But there's a scene in that movie that's so illustrative of these dynamics, which is, he's meeting with the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers is trying to sort of provoke him into anger. And when he sort of succeeds, the owner says to him, basically, "You have to understand

• 1:16:23Sarah McBride?

  that when you are a first, if you respond to a slur with a slur, they'll only hear yours. If you respond to a punch with a punch, they'll say you're the aggressor." If we go in and say to these folks, "We're never going to work with you because you're never going to work with us," then we get the blame for never working with them, not them. If we go in and we respond to their hatred with vitriol and anger, they're going to blame us. And that's the reality of the double standard in our politics. That's the reality that a first always has to navigate.

• 1:17:04Sarah McBride?

  Let them put their anger, their vitriol on full display. Let us provide that contrast with our approach. Look, it's not going to always work out and it's not always going to create the outcome that you desire, but people need us to demonstrate that contrast to them, for them to truly see it.

• 1:17:26Ezra Klein?

  I've been having a conversation in a very different context than this, but I'm curious to hear your answer to it. I've been having this conversation about whether or not good politics always requires clear enemies. Do you believe it does?

• 1:17:42Sarah McBride?

  No.

• 1:17:48Sarah McBride?

  I believe that you can tell a compelling story with an enemy. There's no question. It sometimes is an easy out in our politics. But I think that there's something to be said about a politics that is rooted in opposition to an enemy, that is fundamentally regressive, that anger is fundamentally conservative in its political outcome. Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton for that matter, did a good job of putting forward an aspirational politics

• 1:18:30Sarah McBride?

  that wasn't defined by who we are against, but by what we are for and about who we can be. And I think that that is a more successful path for progressive politics than an enemies-based politics, which so often devolves to anger, which I think more often than not facilitates in the medium and long term of regressive politics. Look, I'm not saying it can't always be effective politics, but that you can have effective politics and good politics and better outcomes with an aspirational politics, with a politics that isn't just about what it's opposed to, but about what it can build and about who we can be. Because I think everyone has sort of this own internal struggle between their own better selves and their

• 1:19:15Sarah McBride?

  better angels and their base instincts.

• 1:19:19Ezra Klein?

  Much earlier in the conversation, I'd asked you about liberalism, which was a little bit of a weird question to drop in there. And I don't really have a question here. It's just something I'm thinking about. But you actually strike me as one of the most liberal as a temperament. Liberal in the classical sense. Politicians I've talked to in a long time. And I've been starting to read a lot of older books about liberalism because it feels to me that it is a thing, an approach to politics that even liberals lost. Yeah. And one of the reasons I think we lost it, I very much count myself as a liberal,

• 1:20:02Ezra Klein?

  was a feeling that liberalism's virtue was its vice. That its openness to critique, its constant balancing, its movement towards incremental solutions, and its skepticism of total solutions, that those had been these conditions under which problems never truly got solved. Systemic racism and bigotry festered. And I think as it began to absorb that critique, it lost a lot of confidence in itself. Mm hmm. In a way, it had had Barack Obama, who was like the apex of the liberal leaders,

• 1:20:47Ezra Klein?

  and he hadn't brought about utopia. Mm hmm. And so it seemed exhausted. And I think alongside that, there's some way in which I cannot, I still need to figure this out, but I'll say it because I believe it's true. I think there's something about the social media platforms that is illiberal as a medium. We now have X, and we have Blue Sky, and we have Threads, and none of them are good. Yeah. They all lead to bad habits of mind. Because simplifying your thoughts down into these little bumper stickers, then having other people who agree with you retweet them or mob you, doesn't lend itself to the pluralistic balancing modes of thought that liberalism is built to prize. They're illiberal in a fundamental way.

• 1:21:34Ezra Klein?

  And so I don't think it's an accident that is liberalism began to lose its own moorings, illiberalism roared back. And just one experience I've had of this whole period with Donald Trump, the second term, is realizing that the thing that we were trying to keep locked in the basement was really dangerous.

• 1:21:56Sarah McBride?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Ezra Klein?

  Really, really profoundly dangerous, even compared to his first term. I mean, the attacks on due process, the trying to break institutions, that if you let that out, if you let the disappearance machine get started, that things can go really badly. And there's something about liberalism that is so unsatisfying.

• 1:22:20Ezra Klein?

  I mean, the work you just described having to do, it sounds so unsatisfying and frustrating.

• 1:22:29Ezra Klein?

  And yet, I guess it's that, and yet.

• 1:22:32Sarah McBride?

  And yet, it is the approach and the system that, while imperfect,

• 1:22:42Sarah McBride?

  is the most likely and most proven to actually lead to the progress that I and I know so many others seek. Look, people have one life, and it is completely understandable that a person would feel, I have one life, and when you ask me to wait, you are asking me to watch my one life pass by without the respect and fairness that I deserve, and that is too much to ask of anyone. And that is. It is our job to demand now, in the face of people who say never. But it's also our job to then not reject the possibility for a better tomorrow as that compromise.

• 1:23:26Sarah McBride?

  I truly believe that liberalism, that our ability to have conversations across disagreement, that our ability to recognize that in a pluralistic, diverse democracy, there will be inevitably people and positions that hurt us. But when you're siloed and when you suppress that opposition underground, in that basement, to use your word, they're alone in there. And not only does that sense of sort of community loneliness breed bitterness,

• 1:24:08Sarah McBride?

  but it also breeds radicalization. Liberalism is not only the best mechanism to move forward, but it is also the best mechanism to rein in the worst excesses of your opposition. Yes, the compromises, you don't get to do everything you want to do. But that is a much better bet than the alternative, which is what we have developed now, which is an illiberal democracy in so many ways in our body politic. One where, yes, we might have temporary victories. But as we are seeing right now, those victories can be fleeting

• 1:24:53Sarah McBride?

  and the consequences can be deadly.

• 1:24:55Ezra Klein?

  Was this always your political temperament or was it forged?

• 1:25:01Sarah McBride?

  I have grown and changed. You know, there are things that I did and said five, 10, 15 years ago that I look back and regret because I think that they were too illiberal. Because I think I bought into a culture online that didn't always bring out the best in me.

• 1:25:22Sarah McBride?

  But I do think that those were exceptions. And even when I was an advocate, I was always perceived as one of the more mainstream respectability advocates. I was always considered someone who was too willing to work across disagreement and engage in conversations that we shouldn't be having. I was always considered someone who was too willing to work within the system. And so I think I fundamentally always had the same perspective and fundamentally have always believed that we cannot eliminate grace from our politics and our change making. And that's rooted in watching my parents grow and change after I came out.

• 1:26:05Sarah McBride?

  Like, I went into that experience knowing my parents were gonna... Look, they are progressive people. They embraced my older brother, who's gay, without skipping a beat. But I knew when I shared that I was trans with them, it was going to be devastating, to use a word that my mother uses. And I knew that if I responded by shutting down the conversation, by refusing to walk with them, by refusing to give them grace and assume good intentions when they would inevitably say and do things that might be hurtful to me, I would stunt their capacity to take that walk with me. And I saw us, as a family, move forward with a degree of grace toward each other, that

• 1:26:49Sarah McBride?

  we were all gonna inevitably say and do things that we would come to regret, that might hurt a little bit, but that if we assumed good intentions and walked forward, that my parents would go from saying, "What are the chances that I have a gay son and a trans child?" From a place of pity to a place of awe in the diversity of our family and the blessings that have come with that diversity. And that only came from grace. And then I saw it, working in Delaware, passing nondiscrimination protections. I've seen it time and time again. And so I have borne witness to change that once seemed so impossible to me as a kid that was almost incomprehensible, not only become possible, but become a reality in large part because of grace in our politics.

• 1:27:32Sarah McBride?

  And yes, because I was willing to extend that grace to others.

• 1:27:37Ezra Klein?

  Grace, blessings, witness are... Are these for you religious concepts?

• 1:27:42Sarah McBride?

  They tap into my religion. I'm Presbyterian. I'm an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church.

• 1:27:52Sarah McBride?

  But I think they go to something for me that transcends religion and my faith and tap into just my sense of beauty toward the world and my sense of beauty at life and the joy that I get to live this life, that I get to be myself and that I get to live a life of purpose. And I know I'm lucky in that respect and I want, I want everyone to have that same opportunity. But, and I have seen that approach and that grace, it's allowed me to be a better version of myself, a happier version of myself, which

• 1:28:35Sarah McBride?

  I think has actually unlocked those opportunities.

• 1:28:39Ezra Klein?

  That's interesting. Is it a practice? When you say that it's allowed you to be a better version of yourself, it's a podcast where everything is ultimately self-help. Is that something that intentionally you cultivate? And if so, how?

• 1:28:58Sarah McBride?

  Yes, I think it's, it's often an intentional choice. So many of the problems that we face are rooted in the fact that hurt people hurt people. And I think we are in this place where we are in this fierce competition for pain, where the left says to the right, what do you know about pain, white, straight, cis man, my pain is real as a queer transgender person? And then the right says to the left, what do you know about pain, college educated, cosmopolitan elite, my pain is real in a post-industrial community ravaged by the opioid crisis? And we are in this competition for pain when there is plenty of pain to go around.

• 1:29:40Sarah McBride?

  And every therapist will tell you that the first step to healing is to have your pain seen and validated. And while it requires intentionality and effort sometimes, I think we would all be better off if we recognized that we don't have to believe that someone is right for what they're facing to be wrong. And I also think that there's one other aspect of this that I think we have lost, which is the intentionality of hope.

• 1:30:17Sarah McBride?

  We have fallen prey in our online discourse, in our politics, to a sense that cynicism is in vogue, that cynicism shows that we get it.

• 1:30:35Sarah McBride?

  And I think one of the things that we have to recognize

• 1:30:40Sarah McBride?

  is sometimes hope is a conscious effort.

• 1:30:46Sarah McBride?

  And that that sense of inevitability, that sort of organic sense of hope that we felt in this post 1960s world, that is the exception in our history. And you have to step into the shoes of people in the 1950s, people in the 1930s, people in the 1850s.

• 1:31:07Sarah McBride?

  And to move past the history that we view with the hindsight of inevitability and go into those moments and recognize

• 1:31:17Sarah McBride?

  that every previous generation of Americans had every reason to give up hope.

• 1:31:23Sarah McBride?

  And you cannot tell me that the reasons for hopelessness now are greater than the reasons for hopelessness then.

• 1:31:29Ezra Klein?

  So you're saying there's something audacious about hope?

• 1:31:32Sarah McBride?

  There is something audacious. There is, you have to summon it. You have to summon it. And I think if we allow ourselves to recognize that hope isn't about optimism, it's about circumstance. It's about evaluating likelihood. Hope is something that transcends that. And when we allow ourselves, when we lull ourselves into this sense of cynicism and we give up on hope, that is when we lose.

• 1:32:04Ezra Klein?

  My editor has this habit of these very Delphic sayings that I have to then think about for a while afterwards.

• 1:32:12Ezra Klein?

  And a week ago, he said to me that cynicism is always stupidity.

• 1:32:17Ezra Klein?

  And in the conversation we're having, I didn't ask him about it.

• 1:32:21Ezra Klein?

  But I think, and he's not here to tell me I'm wrong, that what he meant is cynicism is the posture that we both know what is happening and we know what is going to happen.

• 1:32:34Ezra Klein?

  That we've seen through the performance

• 1:32:38Ezra Klein?

  into the real grimy, pathetic backstage. And we know it's rigged.

• 1:32:47Ezra Klein?

  We know it's plotted and planned.

• 1:32:50Ezra Klein?

  And so it's this posture, this knowing posture of idiocy.

• 1:32:55Sarah McBride?

  I think it's that and it's just, it's easy. It's easy.

• 1:33:01Ezra Klein?

  I think that's the place to end. Always a final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:33:06Sarah McBride?

  So to this conversation, I think one of the best books on political leadership and understanding how to foster public opinion change is Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It's one of my favorite books. Two, I've been reading over time, it's not new, These Truths by Joe Lepore. One volume history of the United States, which helps to reinforce that so many of the challenges and dynamics that we face in this moment are actually not unique, even if the specifics are, how cyclical our challenges are and our history is. And then the final one that I'm actually rereading, I read it in the first term of Trump, is The Final Days, the sequel to All the President's Men.

• 1:33:51Sarah McBride?

  And you realize, reading that, how often it felt like Nixon was going to get away with everything, that he'd stay in office and it'd be fine for him. And how many instances that it appeared to be done and that he had won until August 9th, 1974 happened and he resigned. And I think for me, it's a helpful reminder that it often seems impossible until it's inevitable.

• 1:34:21Ezra Klein?

  Congresswoman Sarah McBride, thank you very much.

• 1:34:23Sarah McBride?

  Thank you.

• 1:34:43Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, mixing by Isaac Jones with Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassillon, Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristen Lynn, and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Sami-Louski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times opinion audio is Anurag Strasser.