When Rep. Sarah McBride was elected to Congress in 2024, she became the chamber’s first-ever trans member.
It was not exactly a banner year for trans rights. Given the apparent success of the Trump campaign’s fearmongering — running ads claiming “Kamala is for they/them” and accusing Harris of promoting “transgender operations on illegal aliens” — Democrats started to fear they were on the wrong side of a losing issue.
Now, the party is trying to take back congressional and governor seats by competing in redder parts of the country. And McBride faces the prospect of sharing the party with more members who have distanced themselves from the most controversial fights for trans rights, such as Ohio’s Amy Acton, Iowa’s Rob Sand, or Texas’ Bobby Pulido.
But McBride doesn’t think their differences in opinion will be an obstacle to working together, as she explained in a Substack Live conversation with The Argument last week. The key element is respect rather than orthodoxy, she said.
“Candidates should run based on what they genuinely believe and feel. I mean, I think they should articulate what their genuine position is on this,” she said. “That truth can also coexist with the truth that we need to be respectful of one another. That doesn’t just mean respectful in the debate, it also means respectful in how we’re talking about the communities impacted by these policies.”
The conversation also touched on the topic that McBride called “political jump ball”: artificial intelligence. She encouraged candidates in frontline races to take aggressive stances on the issue.
She pointed to people’s anger at AI content and data centers as evidence of the issue’s salience — and to the Trump administration’s slap-dash approach to regulation as evidence of its importance.
“As we have seen with social media, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube easily. If you unleash an entire technology with little to no regulation, and it’s onboarded throughout society, it’s really hard to regulate that after the fact. And so, we are in a quickly shrinking window to meaningfully regulate,” she said.
Watch the video above to see the full conversation.
