Lisa Goodman, the founding president of Equality Delaware, a statewide LGBTQ organization, worked at the same law firm as McBride’s father. After McBride came out, Dave and Sally talked to Goodman in her office for three hours, Goodman remembered, and she said two things that stuck with them.
“I said, ‘This changes everything,’” Goodman recalled, regarding McBride’s ability to help lobby for state legislation that would help trans people. “I also said, ‘Sarah is going to do more as Sarah than you ever imagined.’”
Both statements proved true. In the fall of 2012, McBride became the first out trans woman to work in the White House when she interned for the Obama administration. The following year, she was integral to helping pass a bill in Delaware that protected transgender people from discrimination.
In 2013, shortly after graduating college, McBride joined the Center for American Progress to work on LGBTQ policy. Then in 2016, she joined the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, as its national press secretary. That same year, she became the first trans person to speak at a major political convention when she gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention.
However, in between doing work that she loved, McBride’s life took a heartbreaking turn.
‘First principles’
McBride married Andrew Cray in August 2014, four days before he died of oral cancer. Even now, McBride said she still holds close a number of lessons Cray and their relationship taught her. Cray, who was a trans attorney for the Center for American Progress, understood that change-making requires nuance and “meeting people where they are,” she said.
“At the end of the day, we can say the right things,” McBride said. “But if we aren’t actually able to deliver real and tangible results for people, if we aren’t actually able to deliver change, then none of it matters. And I think he really, more than any person I’ve ever met, was able to bridge all of those, not just complexities, but in many cases contradictions, and figure out how to move forward.”
McBride said Cray had a childlike goofiness, similar to one of her favorite TV characters, Ted Lasso.
They met at a White House Pride celebration in June 2012. They started dating, and their relationship was “built on a unique shared experience: the by-product of years of each of us fighting to be ourselves,” McBride wrote in her memoir.
When McBride and Cray moved in together in 2013, she “felt more fulfilled and happier than I’d ever imagined.” But then Cray was diagnosed with oral cancer after seeing a doctor about a sore on his tongue. After surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, he was declared cancer-free in the spring of 2014 only for the cancer to return a few months later. As Cray, who was just 28, became increasingly ill, McBride was his caretaker. They married in August on the rooftop of their apartment building shortly before he died.
Bridging contradictions and showing up
McBride’s closest friends in politics say she shares that same ability Cray had to “bridge contradictions” and to actually create change. The best example of that, they said, was her work to pass paid family leave in Delaware.
McBride was elected to the state Senate in November 2020, making her the country’s first openly trans state senator. In her first term, she successfully sponsored and helped pass the Healthy Delaware Families Act, a program that will allow covered employees to take up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave and up to six weeks of paid leave for medical needs or family caregiving. The governor signed the program into law in May 2022, and it takes effect Jan. 1, 2026.
