Lisa Goodman, founding president of Equality Delaware, a statewide LGBTQ organization, worked at the same law firm as McBride’s father. After McBride got out, Dave and Sally talked with Goodman in his office for three hours, Goodman remembered, and he told them two things that stuck with them.
“I said, ‘This changes everything,'” Goodman recalled of McBride’s ability to help lobby for state legislation that would help trans people. “And I said, ‘Sarah is going to act more like Sarah than she ever imagined.'”
Both statements were justified. In the fall of 2012, McBride became the first trans woman to work in the White House while interning for the Obama administration. The following year, she played an integral role in helping pass a bill in Delaware protecting transgender people from discrimination.
In 2013, shortly after graduating college, McBride joined the Center for American Progress to work on LGBTQ policy. Later in 2016, she joined the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, as national press secretary. In the same year he became the first trans person to speak while speaking at a major political convention, the Democratic National Convention.
However, in between doing what he loves, 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 onto a number of lessons that Cray and their relationship taught her. A trans advocate for the Center for American Progress, Cray realized that making change requires nuance and “meeting people where they are.”
“At the end of the day, we can say the right things,” McBride said. “But if we can’t deliver real and tangible results for people, if we can’t actually deliver change, then none of that matters. I think he really, more than anyone I’ve ever met, was able to sort through all of that, not just the complexities, but in many cases the contradictions, and figure out how to move forward.
McBride said Cray was as silly as a child, like Ted Lasso, one of his favorite TV characters.
They met in June 2012 at the White House pride party. They began dating, and their relationship was built on “a unique shared experience: the product of years each of us struggling to be ourselves,” McBride wrote in her memoir.
When McBride and Cray moved in together in 2013, she “felt more fulfilled and happy than I ever imagined.” However, Krey was diagnosed with oral cancer after consulting a doctor about a sore on his tongue. After surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, he was declared cancer-free in the spring of 2014, but the cancer returned a few months later. As Cray, then 28, became increasingly ill, McBride was his caretaker. In August, they got married on the roof of the building where they lived shortly before his death.
Eliminating and showing contradictions
McBride’s closest friends in politics say he shares the same ability Cray needs to “break through contradictions” and actually create change. The best example of this, they said, was the case of passing paid family leave in Delaware.
McBride was elected to the state Senate in November 2020, making her the nation’s first openly trans state senator. In his first term, he successfully sponsored and helped pass the Healthy Delaware Families Act, a program that would allow covered workers to take up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave and up to six weeks of paid leave for medical needs or family care. The governor signed the program into law in May 2022, and it goes into effect on January 1, 2026.