Guest Post: It’s Time for Fairness for Transgender Delawareans
We welcome back to DL a Delaware politico who made her mark on Delaware politics while still in high school as a member of the Jack Pack. Sarah McBride writes today about her experience as a Transgender person.
My name is Sarah McBride. I’m a daughter, sister, friend, film-buff, political volunteer, and a recent college graduate. I’m also transgender.
When I came out a little over a year ago, I asked Delaware Liberal to publish my coming out letter in order to raise awareness around gender identity nondiscrimination and the lack of basic protections for transgender Delawareans.
It’s 2013. Yet, in Delaware, a person can be fired from their job simply because they are transgender. We can be denied housing or insurance for no reason other than our gender identity. And we can be thrown out of a restaurant or denied service because of who we are.
According to a recent survey, more than 25% of transgender people report losing their job because they are transgender and nearly 20% report being denied housing. While the vast majority of Delawareans are inclusive and accepting people, it only takes one person’s prejudice in a state without basic protections to harm someone and to destroy the reputation of a great state.
Discrimination based on someone’s identity is inherently wrong and it is certainly not the Delaware way.
This month we can take an important step forward in ending discrimination in our state. Last week, Senator Margaret Rose Henry and Representative Bryon Short, as well as nearly 20 other members of the General Assembly, introduced the Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Act of 2013. This bill would add gender identity, a person’s deeply held sense of their gender, to our state’s hate crimes and employment, housing, insurance, and public accommodations laws.
More than 15 states and 160 cities and counties have already passed similar laws. And as expected, the only outcome of those pieces of legislation was that transgender people have been treated like the human beings that we are.
The mean-spirited attacks against this bill are nothing new. They’ve been threated in other states before. Indeed, they’ve been cited in basically every effort for fairness and equality over the last 100 years. They were the arguments used to keep gay and lesbian people from teaching in schools and using locker rooms; opponents were wrong about protections for gay and lesbian people and they are wrong about protections for transgender people.
Throughout my childhood, I struggled with who I really am. For the longest time, I buried my truth deep inside and tried to move on with my life. But by the age of 13, I thought about my gender identity every single waking hour of every day. I watched as my life passed me by and I was afraid to live as myself.
I didn’t keep it inside for fear of my parents or friends supporting me. I kept it inside and coped with the pain because I feared discrimination. I feared that all I was and all I could be would be consumed by one aspect of who I am. I feared that my family and I would be alone because my government wouldn’t be there to help and protect us.
When the incompleteness finally became too much, I came out. My news was met with acceptance from both my college campus and my community back in Delaware. While it was hard for my parents at first, in time my dad said, “I don’t feel like I’m losing a son, I feel like I’m gaining a daughter.” When I called my old boss, Governor Markell, to tell him, he did not skip a beat in telling me that I am the same person that he and the First Lady love and support.
And that’s the thing. Despite a change on the outside and truth on the inside, I am the same person. I am the same person who has always considered myself a proud Delawarean, someone whose life’s dream was always to live and work here.
While my experience has been positive, when I’m home, I live in constant fear that discrimination could lurk around any corner. I have to build up so much courage to simply walk out of my house to go down the street for dinner or to run an errand. Every day, in a state without protections, transgender people live just one person’s kindness and acceptance away from being fired or thrown out of a restaurant simply because of who they are or how they were born.
When I graduated from college three weeks ago, I was faced with a choice that no one should have to make: the choice between living in the state I love and call home and being safe and secure. The Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Act of 2013 would allow me to come home to my family without fear. It would tell those currently struggling that they are not alone. It would ensure that Delaware is truly the fair and welcoming place we all know it to be.
For all those living in fear or facing discrimination, please call or email your state senator and state representative and urge them to support Senate Bill 97, the Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Act.
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Thank you, Sarah, for your courage, your leadership, and your dedication to helping us make Delaware a supportive state for ALL of its citizens.
Proud to be a native Delawarean and an AU student who has gotten to witness the work you did shoring the presence of trans* equality at our school. With advocates like you at the fore, equality and non-discrimination will live in DE.
Welcome home Sarah! Hopefully soon for good with the safety and security of SB97.
Also, your dress is really cute.
Dear Sarah, I’ve not posted since they went 5.0 around here, and were trying to scare me away. But your journey from within that led you to go, and do, and be, and the subsequent pilgrimage back home compels me to applaud your commitment, courage, and activism so near your committed decision.
Having past worked the surgical side of these decisions in the late 70’s–80’s, I can assure you there are a HUGE host of supportive people, professionals, and peer groups during your journey, however far you decide to go–unlike the decades prior. But there is progress still to be made.
Of no greater tenderness, and prompting me to write is the picture of you with your parents. Always remember, this decision was yours, and as “accepting and loving and supportive and open” they may be–you rocked their world. They can only go forward with your plan, and not anything they may have imagined rightfully or not. And they still love you, because they still have you. But they don’t know the script, and they are going to mess up somewhere, and just please oh please show them the same love, forgiveness, patience, and support they seem to be so freely, lovingly, and acceptingly giving you. You seem to be on a decided path, you sure don’t want to alienate your two biggest fans! You are a model of courage. Congratulations for your decisive journey early on, instead of tons of therapy, tequila, and tranquilizers avoiding issues for another decade!
PS It’s great to be an activist, but don’t deny your need for privacy at times too–or your parents’ 🙂 ! All the best bitch!!
I knew we would pull you back in Joanne! See, 5.0 is not that scary.
Regarding Sarah’s post… I must be honest. Before Sarah came out as transgender, I was one of those who, while wholeheartedly supportive of equal rights for gays, did not understand transgenders. Not out of any hatred. I just did not understand or comprehend it. I could understand being straight, as I am straight. I could understand being gay, because I have many friends who are gay. So on a personal level, I was familiar with and comfortable with both. I was not familiar with transgender, and the only image I had in my mind of the T in LGBT was of “cross dressing drag queens”, and I just did not understand because I did not know.
Then Sarah wrote her coming out letter that I first read on Tim McBride’s Facebook page, and that she eventually allowed to be published here on DL (linked in the story above). Her courage allowed me a glimpse into her life, into how she discovered as a child who she was, how she hid it for years and struggled with it, and her honesty and courage finally allowed me to understand. She allowed me to know. And I will be forever grateful to her for that.
Because, let’s be honest. Discrimination has its beginnings in someone’s fear of the unknown or fear of the different. Even in a flaming liberal, discrimination is possible if something remains unknown to them. And the reason why the slow march to equality in all things, race, sex, religion, and sexual orientation and now gender identity, has accelerated is because we all have become, on a personal level, more knowledgeable and aware, because of the courageous actions of people like Sarah McBride. Being gay because more accepted over the last thirty years BECAUSE more and more people came out, and thus more and more people knew friends and family who were gay. And now, the same is true for transgender.
So I will be forever grateful for Sarah’s example and her courage. Thank you.
Kinda funny huh? 5.0 scary, Sarah not.
Thank you for this, Sarah. Beautiful and moving.
I will start by saying I don’t think the legislation this post is intended to support is a good idea. It seems obvious the regular readers of this site would think it is a good idea. With that said, I am surprised how few overall comments this post has received. A week later, this comment makes #9. Posts here usually receive dozens more. Maybe this legislation isn’t such a good idea now that its spelled out in front of us?