The Sum Of The Whole

We are multidimensional, we are so much more than our trans identity but sometimes they are overlooked by others.

"I'm proud of who I am, but I'm more than one identity": The fight for transgender voices in 2020
CBS News
By Emily Tillett
July 18, 2019


The first thing Sarah McBride did after launching her candidacy for the Delaware state senate was take a deep breath and press a button that launched her campaign website. The second thing she did: hug her mom.
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Twenty-eight-year-old McBride, a transgender activist who was the first openly transgender person to address a major party convention in U.S. history at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, is running for the state legislature. If elected, she would become the first transgender state senator in U.S. history.
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Her campaign has the support of some of Delaware's best known politicians, including former Vice President Joe Biden's family, Sen. Chris Coons and Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, who called McBride a "tireless advocate and trailblazer" well-known throughout the state. 

Any trans candidate has a hard time shaking off the yoke of being trans and focusing on the issues. That is the trick, look at any of the successful trans candidates they ran on the issues and avoided be labeled by their opposition and the news media as a “trans candidate.

While the trans community has made significant progress over the last two election cycles at the state, local and administrative levels, progress has been slower at the federal level. In the 2018 midterms, none of the nine transgender candidates that ran for the U.S. House of Representatives won their races.

Brianna Westbrook, Vice Chair of the Arizona Democratic Party, says that's due in part to two major obstacles: "Many of us ran in solidly Republican districts," for one, and and [sic] the second factor, she said, is funding.

I sometimes wonder if they let us run in districts where we don’t have a chance of winning. In one way that, well to put it bluntly… sucks. However in another way it is good, we get national press and we show that we are a lot more than just another trans candidate.