The Good Politics of Sarah McBride

Trans liberation—along with all other liberations—has the greatest chance of success through economic liberation

There is a progressive way to construe the Dobbs decision handed down by the Supreme Court in 2022, which empowered state governments, rather than the federal government, to codify abortion legislature. Legalized abortion was always on shaky ground relying on Roe v Wade, whose rendering of the debate as a version of the right to privacy made it vulnerable to changing political winds.

Lo and behold, those winds had in fact turned favorable for the pro-life movement when the 45th president’s repeated lucky Supreme Court breaks led to a 6-3 conservative court and, ultimately, the downfall of Roe.

Abortion has now been brought down to the states, where grassroots activism and state legislative efforts can strengthen the pro-choice movement’s political efforts to one day bring forth a constitutional amendment, or some other form of constitutional doctrine, codifying reproductive freedom into federal law.

Or, at least, theoretically speaking: given the level of partisan polarization within our political climate, along with the existential nature of the debate around abortion, it seems like an eventual amendment, or any other such movement, may be far off into the future.

Still, the reset to states rights on this issue should be looked at by abortion advocates as an opportunity to reengage the movement’s efforts, this time on sturdier political ground.

The same type of dialectic could be said of Trump’s January 20th Executive Order 14168—Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government—which turned the issue of biological sex and gender identity into a matter of federal writ (“It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality“).

In the same way that the Dobbs decision may be construed as a long-game Trojan Horse for reproductive freedom, EO 14168 holds the potential to unlock a critical flank in the war for transgender equality. In going out of his way to make the federal government go on record about the immutability of a binary sex segregation, Trump has left the more important piece of this debate—gender—vulnerable to challenge, leaving the conversation open for trans advocates to take up the debate in their favor.

Delaware representative Sarah McBride (D), the first and only openly transgender member of Congress, has been a flashpoint in this debate from the moment she was sworn in this January. And whoever has been advising her behind-the-scenes deserves a Nobel for the staunch and effective messaging discipline she has so far displayed. As such, she remains the most effective bulwark against the reactionary politics that today have all the winds in their sails.

Yesterday, we learned that a subcommittee hearing in which McBride was a speaker was abruptly adjourned by the chair, Representative Keith Self of Texas (R), after he was told he was “out of order” by Representative William Keating of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, for introducing McBride as “Mr. McBride.” Congressman Self later defended his introduction during the hearing, echoing EO 14168 and writing on X that “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.”

For her part, Congresswoman McBride merely reiterated her commitment to fulfilling the duties of her office: “No matter how I'm treated by some colleagues, nothing diminishes my awe and gratitude at getting to represent Delaware in Congress. It is truly the honor and privilege of a lifetime. I simply want to serve and to try to make this world a better place.”

Some may characterize her remarks as conciliatory towards what to most people was a hostile attack on her very personhood. In insisting on referring to her as a man, Self was impugning not her character, but a part of her identity. Surely, it would make perfect sense for McBride to clap back and register the battlecry of trans liberation, something which her singular identity in Congress calls for adopting, wouldn’t it?

Yet, whether or not it would make sense actually has nothing to do with the more important element of political strategy, something which anyone concerned with trans rights must take seriously at this perilous hour for trans equality. What should matter in this debate is not political posturing, but good politics itself, and it is this critical aspect of leadership in which almost every single Democrat in office and in other positions of power, especially Mr. Keating, have for a long time now been woefully, albeit predictably, deficient.

Yet, it’s precisely this other more favorable kind of strategy which McBride seems to be implementing with aplomb in this very early part of her political career and she deserves much attention and interest for it.

There isn’t much to go by only two months into her tenure. And what there is to glean is a mixed bag. A look at her X account and other sources reveals a boilerplate, un-Squad-like position on almost all standard Dem party issues. She appears to be concerned with the worker-centered PRO act, righteously condemns Republican plans to cut the Medicaid budget and is regularly tweeting about her district, including its veterans, all great things for any member of the Democratic Party to put front and center of their policies.

She does repeat the standard Dem dogma about how bad Putin is and how this or that dictator is now supposedly one of Trump’s friends. That is all of a piece with the party, one supposes.

But what is hopeful about her positions thus far is their notable absence of the kind of alienating, fringe-oriented technocratic-speak that has made rad libs and progressives within the party the bane not just of the MAGA right, but of a vast majority of average Americans of broad political persuasion whose main concerns have been and always will be pocketbook issues, not the overspill of academic concerns which make up the pet topics du jour of coastal affluent ideologues and towards which one may trace the Democratic Party’s stunning defeat in November.

This relative conservatism in regard to her party’s standard platform is likely the effect of a great deal of patience and pragmatism and it is on that front that she has thus far seemed to present a worthy test case of the kind of politics the party is sorely in need of. McBride does not seem disposed to take too robust a position on trans rights, at least for now, and that is a good thing in terms of effective politics, considering that trans rights serve as a proxy issue for the wider revanchist aims of a newly empowered populist rightwing. She’s not exactly a Democratic Socialist, nor a Centrist, nor a Progressive, either. Her caucus memberships, which include both the Progressive Caucus and the New Dem Coalition, support this smart and syncretic approach she so far seems to be taking. This is all an interesting political profile for someone whose identity is front and center in our country’s most sanguinary culture war battle.

Indeed, no one but her is in a better position to present the public with the face of realistic rationalism. She could leave it to Congressman Keating, the ranking Democrat at the subcommittee meeting who rose to her defense after Self’s slur, to carry out all of the culture war bloodletting. Keating’s follow up remarks, with their unctuous calls for “decency,” present the opposite case and a return to politics as usual for the Democrats, who seem incapable of resisting any opportunity to come across as scolds and schoolmarms.

It’s unfortunate given that here is precisely where the Republicans have opened themselves up for attack, because of EO 14168 and its incomplete language on gender, and why Keating’s ineffectual posturing reveals how much more Democrats have to learn in order to rise to the occasion of meeting politically regressive strategies on the part of gleeful Republicans carrying out lurid culture war spectacles, such as Nancy Mace’s ludicrous hysteria.

To be clear, EO 14168 is a reactionary document that never once mentions transgender people but whose comprehensive—and erroneous—equation of sex and gender effectively circles the wagons around transgender identity. It is impossible to read this order without understanding its underlying motive to severely restrict transgender persons’ access to bathrooms assigned to their gender—and not their sex—and it empowers agencies named in the document to unleash torrents of new enforcement protocols around a wide range of sectors in public life. As a result, Sarah McBride may soon be forced out of the women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill, not by the hysterical braying of one Nancy Mace, but by the statutory power of federal writ.

It is true, the order clearly establishes that, as far as Uncle Sam is concerned and for however long this Executive Order stands, sex and gender are to be understood as identical. When Congressman Self insisted on referring to McBride as “Mr. McBride,” his justification for doing so rested specifically on Section 2. (g): “‘Gender identity’ reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality and sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.”

But this is a flimsy case for forms of address like “Mr.” and “Mrs.” By emphasizing gender as an “identity,” rather than a social fact, and one that “reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self,” the order opens a path for numerous good faith challenges, of which the misgendering of McBride during the subcommittee hearing yesterday was a perfect example. Trans rights activists should use the opportunity given them by the draconian and heavy-handed language in the order, which fails to establish gender as a social category. Instead, it tries to render it as something of a psychological state, something that not only fails to line up with much scientific research, but with the wider intuition about gender held by most Americans.

In his righteous defense of Sarah McBride’s personhood against the hostility coming from Representative Self, Keating was no doubt doing his part in the daily kicking up of political spectacle, a practice which assuredly motivated Self’s reactionary remarks against McBride, as well. Never discount the capacity for fundraising efforts to push members of Congress towards these sensationalist jousts in order to provide fodder for donation hunting emails with subject lines that read “Have you heard what happened on Capitol Hill today?”

This should serve as a lesson for those who want to move the needle in the other direction. The real work is going to be less sexy than the usual talking points which provide material for semi-scripted blow-ups that dominate a micro news cycle during the better part of one hour of a day on 24 hour cable news and on social media.

The fact of the matter was that Self, like many in his party, do have the wind to their back: as far as the Executive Order is concerned, he was merely carrying out its guidance, precisely what he claimed later in the day on X he had been doing.

Which, like the Dobbs decision with respect to pro-choice activists, leaves trans rights advocates with the responsibility of doing the large work of organizing on the grassroots level, constructing constitutional challenges to the language in the EO 14168 and solidifying states rights initiatives to entrench trans equality on a state by state basis.

The backing of Biden’s White House, with all of its agency directives, enabled trans rights activists to circumvent this much more difficult, though more durable, work. And it had the added unfortunate outcome of alienating enough MAGA activists with loud voices to retaliate in an effective manner last November.

Trans lives will benefit from taking a page out of the instrumental rule playbook by eschewing the alienating language policing and abstruse political lingo of the woke progressives; it should be a foregone conclusion at this point that such measures can not lead to the kinds of policy successes anyone concerned with matters of civil rights and civil equality are hoping for.

Now in the wake of this defeat, they can put energy into solidarity movements and into the great work of creating official definitions of the terms “sex” and “gender,” something which Trump’s Executive Order attempts to do with rather flimsy justification. These are the coming fault lines of the debate and striking where the opposition is weak, as it is in this very loathsome Executive Order, is sound political strategy. Sarah McBride’s good politics is a great opening volley in the battle.