Tomorrow Will Be Different Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Sarah McBride

  Foreword copyright © 2018 by Hon. Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McBride, Sarah, 1990– author.

  Title: Tomorrow will be different : love, loss, and the fight for trans equality / Sarah McBride.

  Description: New York : Crown Archetype, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017040046 (print) | LCCN 2017049458 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781524761493 (e-book) | ISBN 9781524761479 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524761486 (trade pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: McBride, Sarah, 1990– | Transgender people—United States—Biography. | Transgender people—Civil rights—United States. | Transgender people—Identity.

  Classification: LCC HQ77.8.M387 (ebook) | LCC HQ77.8.M387 A3 2018 (print) | DDC 306.76/8092 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017040046.

  ISBN 9781524761479

  Ebook ISBN 978152476149

  Cover design by Rachel Willey

  Photo credits: this page: courtesy of the author; this page: © Samantha Appleton; this page: Courtesy: Human Rights Campaign photographer: Judy Rolfe; this page: Equality Delaware; this page and this page: courtesy of the author; this page: © Associated Press.

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  For Andy

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  FOREWORD BY JOE BIDEN

  INTRODUCTION: This is the world we will help build.

  CHAPTER 1: “I’m transgender.”

  CHAPTER 2: “Hi, I’m Andy….I think we’d get along pretty swimmingly.”

  CHAPTER 3: “Sarah.”

  CHAPTER 4: The People’s House.

  CHAPTER 5: The political is personal.

  CHAPTER 6: “Please pass this bill.”

  CHAPTER 7: One step closer to justice.

  CHAPTER 8: “Will you still love me?”

  CHAPTER 9: “It hasn’t taken away my voice.”

  CHAPTER 10: “Amazing grace.”

  CHAPTER 11: Righteous anger.

  CHAPTER 12: There was that word again. “History.”

  CHAPTER 13: Our voices matter.

  STUDIES AND RESOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Foreword by Joe Biden

  I remember the first time I heard about Sarah McBride.

  It was 2006 and my son Beau was running in his first election for attorney general of Delaware. We often talked about the issues, fund-raising, and ads. But second only to our family, he talked most of all about the people he met—nurses, longshoremen, the single mom working the diner, the children and seniors needing protection from predators, the teachers paying out of pocket for supplies for their students. He knew the campaign was about them—and the people who worked for him and shared his belief that his grandfather first taught me, that everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect.

  That’s when Beau told me about a smart, sharp teenager who was volunteering on the campaign, knocking on doors, making phone calls, and doing the hard work of democracy.

  It was in one of those conversations that Beau gave Sarah his highest praise, telling me she was “going to change the world.”

  That’s how I first heard about Sarah.

  But it was only in 2012, when, like most everyone else, we learned who she really was when she came out as transgender. I read her powerful coming-out essay in American University’s student newspaper, where she didn’t just speak her truth, she put a face, name, and voice to an identity that is too often caricatured and demonized.

  She was honest and heartfelt. Even at that young age, she was a leader. Not because she thought she was better than anyone else, but because she treated everyone as equals. She was a Biden even then.

  Despite her internal struggle, Sarah would be the first to say she was the lucky one and that she stands on the shoulders of famous advocates and everyday activists who marched and fought to create a world where a story like hers might be possible.

  She’d remind us of all the people who came before her who lived their secrets until death, or risked their jobs, careers, and sometimes their physical safety when they came out, who never received the acceptance she did from her family and friends.

  My admiration for her sense of perspective and purpose grew when she interned at the White House, becoming the first transgender woman to ever do so and giving meaning to what Harvey Milk once said: “Hope will never remain silent.”

  By then, the administration had ended the discriminatory law known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” so our gay service members could openly serve the country they love without hiding who they love. President Obama announced that our government would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act—and just a few days after Sarah wrote her coming-out essay, I went on Meet the Press and told America that love is love is love.

  During Sarah’s time in the White House, she saw how every issue we cared about—delivering affordable health care to millions of people, creating good-paying middle-class jobs, keeping our country safe, addressing climate change, and, yes, advancing equality for LGBTQ Americans—all came down to that basic belief held since our founding, that we are all created equal, endowed with basic unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  After her White House internship ended, she worked to secure those rights back home in Delaware. I’d read the local papers to learn how she testified in front of the General Assembly on the need for hate-crimes legislation protecting LGBTQ Delawareans. Beau, Delaware’s attorney general, would tell me how she organized grassroots efforts to help him and Governor Jack Markell enact a law protecting those same Delawareans from being denied housing, employment, or public accommodations.

  She was just out of college and she had already changed the world.

  It was also around this time when her world changed once again, in the most human, universal, and most cruel way. She fell in love and married a good, decent, honorable man only to watch cancer take his life and love away from her.

  For those of us who know, such a loss leaves a black hole in your heart. It wounds your soul. The pain never really goes away. But as the seasons pass, you remember how your loved one would have lived—and that picks you up and keeps you going. You think about all the people who have suffered the same as or more than you, but with a lot less help or reason to get through—and that picks you up and keeps you going.

  For Sarah, she has gotten up and kept going with Andy still in her heart and soul. And she continues to be there for every transgender person still rejected by their families and friends. For the one in five who will be fired from their jobs because of who they are. For the transgender women of color who continue to live in an epidemic of violence. For the young transgender student bullied and harassed in schools or homeless on the streets. She is there for every transgender American targeted by state legislators and their “bathroom bills” that serve only to prey on people’s fears.

  And as this book is being published, she is there for every transgender service member under attack by a
president who lacks the moral clarity of the nation in abundance of it because of people like Sarah and everyone Barack, Michelle, Jill, and I met in our lives and while we were in office. In their homes, on our staff, on the front lines of war, and in houses of worship, we have known, stood with, and supported countless gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans and their families, who are just like us.

  I’m proud to have been a part of an administration that spoke out and stood up for transgender Americans. But despite that progress, I left the vice presidency knowing that much of the hardest work remains ahead of us in building a more perfect union for all Americans, no matter their sexual orientation or gender identity.

  The history of civil rights in America reminds us that progress is precious and can never be taken for granted. In the face of hateful rhetoric or divisive legislation, we cannot remain silent. That’s why Jill and I are proud that our foundation will focus on LGBTQ equality along with other causes that are near and dear to our hearts, from ending violence against women to finding a cure for cancer.

  In doing this work, I return to the most important lesson my father taught me and my children, the same principle that animates courageous advocates like Sarah McBride: that all people are entitled to be treated with dignity and respect.

  It’s a simple proposition, but one that too often gets lost in the political noise.

  As a country, we need to reject the false distinction between social inequality and economic inequality, for any barrier to good jobs, safe schools, or basic health care is inequality one and the same.

  As a nation, we must continue to ensure that the American Dream is available to all people. Our LGBTQ fellow citizens are service members and factory workers, teachers and doctors. They are patients and caregivers, family members and friends. Equality is not a matter of “identity politics,” it is a human right, and an economic necessity for many of the most vulnerable in this nation, people whose lives, dignity, and security are on the line.

  We are at an inflection point in the fight for transgender equality, what I have called the civil rights issue of our time. And it’s not just a singular issue of identity, it’s about freeing the soul of America from the constraints of bigotry, hate, and fear, and opening people’s hearts and minds to what binds us all together.

  And that’s what makes Sarah’s book so powerful. If you’re living your own internal struggle, this book can help you find a way to live authentically, fully, and freely. If you’re a parent or a teacher of a transgender child, it will help you see the world through their eyes. Most of all, if you have never known a transgender person, or have genuine questions about who they are, let this book be an opportunity to learn and put your mind at ease.

  Let it show that we all have hopes and dreams and experience joy and sorrow.

  Let it show that we are all created equal and entitled to be treated with dignity and respect.

  In July 2016, ten years after I first heard her name, Sarah delivered an impassioned speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia and spent the subsequent weeks on the campaign trail doing the hard work of democracy she once did as a high school student. A few months later, in December, Jill and I hosted our last holiday party at the Naval Observatory, and even if the festive mood was dampened by the electoral loss, we enjoyed the evening with our closest friends, who made the previous eight years an experience of a lifetime.

  Sarah and her family were there. On their way out, I stopped to thank her for everything she did for Beau. Her response brought me to tears.

  “It was an honor to know your son. He embraced me without hesitation and helped make it possible for me to live my dreams and return to my family and home.”

  I know Beau was proud to have known Sarah. Jill and I share his pride.

  After reading her story, I hope you do, too.

  Joe Biden

  Wilmington, Delaware

  September 2017

  INTRODUCTION

  This is the world we will help build.

  It’s rare to know in real time that what you are about to do will define the course of the rest of your life. But as I sat at my laptop in the small office I had been given as student body president at American University, I knew that my world was about to turn upside down. I was about to reveal my deepest secret and take a step that just a few months before would have seemed impossible and unimaginable.

  My hand hovered over the keypad of my laptop, ready yet reluctant to click “post” on a Facebook note that would change my life forever. I could almost hear the responses I feared would come.

  What a freak.

  Ew.

  This is disgusting.

  And probably the most biting, because I was afraid it was true: Well, there goes any life and future for that kid.

  Throughout my whole life until this point, it had always seemed that my dreams and my identity were mutually exclusive. My life had been defined by a constant tension between the two: the belief—as certain as the color of the sky—that it was impossible for me to have a family, a career, fulfillment, while also embracing the truth that I am a transgender woman.

  For the first twenty-one years of my life, my dreams—the possibility of improving my world and making my family proud—had won out over my identity. But the older I got, the harder it became to rationalize away something that had become clear was the core of who I am. And by college, it had enveloped my whole being. It was present every second of my life.

  I no longer had a choice. I couldn’t hide anymore. I couldn’t continue living someone else’s existence. I needed to come out. I needed to tell the world that I was transgender. I needed to live my own life as me.

  A little over a year before, I had been elected student body president at American University. AU, nestled between suburban neighborhoods in northwest Washington, D.C., is one of the most politically active schools in the country and boasts a rich history of political milestones. It was the site where John F. Kennedy called for “not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time” months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the home of the younger Ted Kennedy’s pivotal endorsement of then-senator Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary.

  I had always loved politics, advocacy, and government. They had seemed like the best way to improve my community and leave a lasting impact on the world. From the ages of six and seven, after discovering the White House and learning about all of the history that occurred within its walls, I knew that politics would be my life’s calling.

  When I served as student body president at AU and began working on the issues I had always cared about—gender equity, racial justice, opportunity regardless of economic background, and, yes, LGBTQ equality—it became clear that making a difference in the world wouldn’t diminish or dilute my own pain and incompleteness.

  I had come out to my parents over winter break in the middle of my yearlong term. Since then, I had come out to my closest friends, and as I woke up on the morning of April 30, 2012, my last day as student body president, I was resolved to announce to the world that I was really Sarah McBride.

  It was a beautiful spring day without a cloud in the sky. I crossed the bustling, open quad at the center of campus, my heart pounding, and made my way to the student center, where the student government offices are located.

  In 2011 and 2012, transgender issues and identities had not burst onto the national scene like they would in the years following. Most people I knew had never even considered the possibility of someone in their life being transgender when I came out to them. I was likely the first transgender person they had ever met—at least as far as they knew.

  AU is a progressive campus. And I knew that the students were, by and large, good, compassionate people. I knew the school was generally inclusive and welcoming of gay students, but I had no chance to see how the campus as a whole would respond to a transgender
student, let alone a transgender student body president.

  Sitting at my desk, I opened my laptop, clicked on Facebook, and reviewed an open letter that I had drafted and redrafted and redrafted several times during the previous few weeks.

  “This note has been a long time coming, 21 years, actually,” the post started.

  Today, I ended my term as AU’s student body president. Being president has been an unbelievable privilege for me. I have learned and grown so much over the last year, both personally and professionally. As proud as I am of all of the issues we tackled together as a campus community, the biggest takeaway, for me, has been the resolution of an internal struggle. You see, for my entire life, I’ve struggled with my gender identity.

  And it was only after the experiences of this year that I was able to come to terms with what had been my deepest secret: I’m transgender.

  For me, it is something I’ve always known but had never accepted. It’s been present my whole life, from as early as I can remember.

  As I reread the note one last time, I was dead certain that I needed to do this, but I knew there was absolutely no going back after I clicked “post.” I was about to jump feetfirst into a world that I wasn’t sure I was prepared for. You don’t resist something so all-encompassing because you think it’s going to be all sunshine and rainbows on the other end.

  There were few high-profile trans success stories at the time. The percentage of Americans who said they knew someone who was transgender was in the single digits, a number that has since risen dramatically. Laverne Cox had yet to grace the cover of Time magazine and Caitlyn Jenner was still the clumsy stepparent in Keeping Up with the Kardashians. For closeted young people, the Internet had been a critical outlet and a window into the lives of the few trans people whose stories or profiles were available. But it also gave me an unvarnished glimpse into the challenges and barriers.

  A year earlier, a startling report by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National LGBTQ Task Force had been published. Titled “Injustice at Every Turn,” the survey was sobering: