Sarah McBride, Desegregating Hero

 

At a House of Representatives hearing yesterday on US relations with Europe, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Keith Self turned to give Delaware Representative Sarah McBride her chance to speak. (McBride is Congress' first transgender member.) Self called upon her as “the representative from Delaware, Mr. McBride.”

Without a beat, McBride replied, "Thank you, Madam Chair." She prepared to give her speech, but first Rep. Bill Keating, the ranking Democrat from Massachusetts, asked Self to correct himself, and when Self again introduced Sarah McBride as "Mr. McBride," Keating asked Self, "Have you no decency?" Self said business would now continue, Keating said not with him until Self properly addressed McBride, and Self said "This meeting is adjourned!" and huffed out.

 Yes, Keating white-knighted Sarah McBride, but she carried herself with great aplomb. She was prepared to do Congressional business despite her being harassed and disrespected by her own peers. She has maintained this coolness in the face of other misgenderings, other attacks, and a federal law being passed by Congressional Republicans to ban trans people from using Congressional bathrooms that match their lived genders--something passed solely to discriminate against her.

On social media, we saw the following comments afterwards:

Self posted, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” citing Trump’s executive order of January 20th.

McBride posted, "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.

Mary Miller, Republican Representative from Illinois, who has also been misgendering McBride, threw in a gratuitous deadname: posting that Self "is right to state the biological reality that [deadname] ‘Sarah’ McBride is a man. Enough with the lies. As God ordained and President Trump declared, there are only TWO GENDERS: Male and Female!"

 And the vile Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina and champion bigot, tossed in, "You know what’s indecent? A mentally ill man pretending to be a woman. Biology. Science. The Left should try it some time." 

As a reminder, the racists who fought against desegregation claimed that their Christian beliefs compelled them to do so. So did the bigots who opposed interracial marriage and later same-gender marriage. They always say God is on their side as they kick people in the face. And back when they were segregating bathrooms along racial lines, they claimed science proved this was imperative, citing eugenics.

Anyway, what really impresses me about McBride is her ability to keep her composure in the face of the provocations and bullying and disrespect. She knows--we all know--her attackers are hoping she gets angry and yells at them so they can paint her as dangerous and themselves as reasonable. And she certainly has justification to do so. (In fact, some trans people criticize her for not coming out swinging and getting in the faces of those harassing her, and for using the private bathrooms of Democratic colleagues rather than defiantly marching into the women's bathroom by the House Chamber.) But McBride is doing something much harder than punching back. She is winning the respect of average Americans watching these incidents on social media and the news. Her attackers look nasty and rude, and she looks reasonable, dignified, and unruffled.

We need all kinds of tactics to win battles for the rights of targets of discrimination. Some of those are confrontational, some of them are community building, some of them are legal challenges, and some of them are educational. But one of the hardest is to be among the first people desegregating an institution, be that baseball or a high school or the House of Representatives. Because all eyes are on you, and you have to keep your cool despite people screeching at you and harassing you and spitting on you, and show that you can play the game, or pass the tests, or do the job of legislating under that kind of pressure.

McBride's not rolling over! She calmly misgendered Self right back. But she was prepared to go right on doing her job representing the people who elected her. It was Self, the zero, who huffed out and left the business of Congress (which Republican Congresspeople seem oddly content to just abandon right now) undone.

Sarah McBride is an American hero.

By Exeutive Order: Trans People Don't Exist!

 

Hi! Your friendly local "gender ideology extremist" here, who isn't trans because there is no such thing as a trans person, you see. According to the new federal policy, recognizing trans people in their lived genders is "invalidating the true and biological category of 'woman,'” endangering them and "replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept!" Therefore, by executive order, the federal government has declared it will not recognize any change of legal sex, in order to protect women’s rights.

Ha, those cherished rights in the Equal Rights Amendment the new administration won't recognize?

Yesterday as promised, immediately after being inaugurated, the president followed the Steve Bannon Principle of "flooding the zone with sh*t." We all knew it was coming. He signed executive orders declaring he will send troops to the border, and ignore the Constitution by invalidating birthright citizenship. Orders withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, making us a rogue nation promoting pandemics and climate crisis. Pardoning the1600 convicted criminals who invaded the US Capitol four years ago. Strangling the IRS so it can't stop the ultrawealthy from cheating on their taxes. Declaring inclusion to be exclusion and equity to be discrimination. The list goes on! (Of course, the president wrote none of these orders. They were handed to him tied with a bow, in the form of the ultra-reactionary Project 2025, which he claimed never to have heard of while campaigning.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The tactic of “flooding the zone” is meant to instill panic and confusion, and to divide and conquer. Don't give in to that! There are so many bad things happening at once, and none of us can fight them all. The hope is that we'll therefore spend our time fighting one another over priorities, or just sit there paralyzed, with everything on fire. Instead, pick a fire to fight and do that, while calling out encouragement to people fighting other fires. And this will be a long fight, so pace yourself. Just do something! If you don't know where to start, ask people how you can help. If you can't think of what else to do and your energy is limited, you can always commit to making one phone call or writing one email every day, or every week. Contact a politician to let them know where you stand, or a community leader to let them know you see and admire what they are doing, or a person you see is suffering to send them emotional support. 

There are a lot of people who are going to need support, and that's just as important as more “political” action! When my government says I do not exist and am instead a deluded hazard, I roll my eyes. Oh, I know that this will have real and concrete negative impacts on my life, but I'm 60 and I have been here before. When I was a teen in NYC and started getting involved in what we'd call LGBTQIA+ politics today, my peers were queer street kids thrown out of their homes around the nation by their parents. They made their way to New York, where many of them were supporting their underage selves with sex work. Then HIV swept the country, and many of them died while politicians talked about “homosexuals” causing a plague, and speculated about putting us in concentration camps where we couldn't infect "the innocent." And so we fought for our lives and those of our friends--protesting with ACT-UP, yes, but also making memorial quilts and advocating with doctors and bringing food to the homes of the sick. 

As MLK would tell you, people don't gain rights by sitting quietly in their homes, hiding and waiting for those mistreating them to see the light and realize what they are doing is wrong. One has to take action--directly, yes, but also indirectly by supporting others.

I saw ACT-UP create change, and Queer Nation grow behind it. There were positive social shifts toward LGBTQIA+ acceptance! But progress sure wasn’t handed to us on a plate by the government. Reagan called queer folk mentally ill. Democrats weren’t much better. Bill Clinton passed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which forbade federal recognition of same-gender marriages if any state should decide to perform them. During the Bush years, a majority of the states passed laws or amended their state constitutions to ban such marriages. I joined thousands of others going door to door trying to convince voters not to support amending their state constitutions. We lost in my state. But we survived and kept fighting! And in 2015 we finally won marriage equality, after decades of struggle. 

So I can take a long view, personally. It’s the young people I worry about. It is so scary to be a trans youth today, and to see your state and then the federal government declaring you have no right to exist, are deluded, are a monster threatening cis girls. A decade ago, we were promising LGBTQIA+ kids that we’d protect them from bullying at school and that they were loved. Today, it’s the opposite, and I see a lot of college students feeling massively betrayed by the people who were supposed to be the wise adults in the room. These young people need us to fight with and for them, and they also need us to support them. To affirm that they are valid and beautiful and loved. 

We know these will be ugly times. But we can preserve beauty in them through love, as people have throughout history! Fight to preserve empathy for others, respect for yourself, justice, truth—in whatever way you can. Once more: none of us can hope to fix all of this. But all of us can do something. 

Take it from your local “gender ideology extremist!”