Rep. Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress, now says the activist playbook of shaming and shunning opponents over the last five years "didn't work", and that falling public support demands a different approach.
McBride, a Delaware Democrat, made the admission in a video produced by Epworth United Methodist Church titled "Dignity, Grace, and Better Angels." In it, she urged allies to stop cutting ties with friends, family, and political figures who disagree with transgender advocacy, a tactic she acknowledged has driven people away rather than winning them over.
The concession amounts to a rare public reckoning from a prominent figure in the transgender movement. McBride did not cite specific polling, but her own framing was blunt: the strategies and tactics of the last half-decade failed, and the movement now finds itself with less public goodwill than it had when those strategies began.
The core of McBride's message was a plea for activists and supporters to remain in conversation with people who oppose transgender policies, even when those conversations are uncomfortable. As Breitbart reported, McBride framed the shift as necessary after years of a strategy that prioritized ideological purity over persuasion.
"Many of the strategies and tactics that we employed over the last five years didn't work."
McBride went further, describing the culture of relationship-severing that became standard practice in progressive activist circles. She acknowledged the impulse behind it, that people who hear hostile rhetoric about their identity want to walk away, but argued the broader movement cannot afford to have every ally do the same.
"I don't want all of my friends and family members and allies though to do the same with that person because I want my friends and family and allies to be able to be proximate to that person so that they can continue to have conversations, to push back, to hold them accountable."
She also offered a softer message to supporters who felt paralyzed by the fear of saying the wrong thing.
"You might not say everything perfectly. It's okay to be imperfect. You don't have to be the perfect ally."
That line stands out against the backdrop of a movement that spent years enforcing rigid speech codes and publicly punishing even sympathetic figures for minor deviations from approved terminology. McBride did not name specific incidents, but the pattern she described, demanding perfection, then excommunicating anyone who fell short, has been a persistent complaint from moderates and even some progressives who found themselves on the wrong side of activist orthodoxy.
McBride's admission that public support has declined over the last five years is significant precisely because it contradicts the narrative that transgender advocacy groups and their media allies have pushed throughout that period. The standard line from progressive institutions has been that opposition to transgender policies is a fringe position driven by bigotry and destined to fade. McBride's own assessment suggests the opposite happened: the more aggressively activists pushed, the more ground they lost.
She did not point to a specific poll or study, and the video did not include data. But the trajectory she described, declining support despite enormous institutional investment in advocacy, corporate partnerships, media coverage, and political organizing, raises an obvious question the movement has been reluctant to confront. Did the tactics themselves cause the backlash?
McBride stopped short of saying so directly. She characterized the strategy of cutting off relationships as something "done from a good place," even as she argued it needs to end.
"This strategy of cutting off conversation and even cutting off relationships, it was done from a good place. I get when you're an LGBTQ person, for instance, if you're in a space where a person is saying deeply hurtful things about LGBTQ people."
She added that she has "no problem" with individuals removing themselves from hostile situations, particularly when mental or physical health is at risk. But she drew a line between personal self-preservation and a movement-wide posture of refusing to engage.
McBride's call for a softer approach fits a personal brand she has cultivated since entering politics. She became the first openly transgender state senator in the country after winning a seat in the Delaware Senate in 2020. Four years later, she won Delaware's lone U.S. House seat, defeating Republican John Whalen III and raising more than $3 million in campaign contributions from donors nationwide, as Fox News reported.
On election night, McBride struck a tone that echoed the church video's themes. "Delaware has sent the message loud and clear that we must be a country that protects reproductive freedom, that guarantees paid leave and affordable child care for all our families," McBride said at the time.
Before McBride was even sworn in, House Speaker Mike Johnson enacted a ban on transgender individuals using Capitol restrooms corresponding to their gender identity, a measure proposed by Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina and widely seen as targeting McBride directly. McBride's response, AP News reported, was characteristically measured: "I'm not here to fight about bathrooms." She said she would follow the rules and focus on her job.
"We can have a politics of grace and not of grandstanding, a politics of progress, not pettiness," McBride said as she prepared to take office.
McBride's church video remarks drew pushback on X, the social media platform, though the specific accounts and posts were not identified. The criticism reportedly came from users who objected to the call for allies to stay engaged with opponents of transgender ideology, suggesting that at least some activists view McBride's proposed shift as capitulation rather than recalibration.
That reaction illustrates the bind McBride's message creates for the movement. For years, the activist infrastructure treated any willingness to engage with skeptics as a form of betrayal. Parents who questioned puberty blockers, women who objected to biological males in female sports, and politicians who voted against preferred legislation were all placed in the same category: enemies to be isolated, not persuaded. McBride is now telling the movement's rank and file that this sorting mechanism failed, and asking them to adopt the opposite posture without fully repudiating the one that came before.
Whether the movement listens is another matter. The institutional incentives that drove the old strategy, fundraising off outrage, social media engagement fueled by conflict, organizational relevance sustained by a permanent sense of crisis, remain in place. McBride's call for grace and imperfect allyship runs against the grain of an activist ecosystem built to reward purity enforcement.
What McBride did not address is as telling as what she said. She did not acknowledge that the strategies she now disowns contributed to real harm, not just to the movement's polling numbers, but to the people who were targeted by them. Families fractured over Thanksgiving dinner politics. Employees fired or publicly shamed for using the wrong pronoun. Teachers and professors who lost positions for questioning activist orthodoxy in academic settings. Small business owners boycotted for holding traditional views on sex and gender.
McBride framed the problem as tactical, the strategy "didn't work", rather than moral. She did not say the approach was wrong because it was coercive, intolerant, or illiberal. She said it was wrong because it failed to produce the desired political outcome. That distinction matters. It suggests the movement's self-correction, if it comes, will be driven by polling rather than principle.
And it leaves open the possibility that if a more effective pressure campaign emerges, one that moves numbers rather than shrinking them, the movement would embrace it without hesitation.
When activists abandon a strategy only because it stopped working, the rest of us are right to wonder what they would do if it started working again.
