Sarah McBride has divided activists after explaining her take on why trans rights have regressed in the US.

The only openly transgender US representative told New York Times columnist Ezra Klein that left-leaning LGBTQ+ activists had “lost the art of change-making over the [past] couple of years”, adding: “By every objective metric, support for trans rights is worse now than it was six or seven years ago.

“That’s not isolated to just trans issues. If you look across issues of gender right now, you have seen a regression.

“Marriage equality support is actually lower now than it was a couple of years ago… we also have seen a regression around support for whether women should have the same opportunities as men, compared [with] five, 10, 15 years ago.”

McBride, who in January became the first trans congresswoman, has often accused her Republican colleagues of using trans topics to distract from their failure to address economic issues.

On how Republicans were able to turn trans rights into a wedge issue, she said: “[It] allowed [them] the right to say: ‘We’re punishing trans people because of their actions’, rather than, ‘We’re going after innocent bystanders’.

“Some of the cultural mores and norms that started to develop around inclusion of trans people were probably premature for a lot of people. We became absolutist, not just on trans rights but across the progressive movement, and we forgot that in a democracy we have to grapple with where the public authentically is and actually engage with it. Part of this is fostered by social media.”

‘We have to be within arm’s reach. If we get too far ahead, we lose our grip’

McBride noted that activism around trans rights became increasingly prominent in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage in 2015, but leftist groups had been guilty of “overplaying of the hand,” and the public wasn’t ready for it yet.

“We decided that we have to say and fight for and push for every single perfect policy and cultural norm right now, regardless of whether the public is ready,” she said. “And I think it misunderstands the role that politicians and social movements have in maintaining proximity to public opinion.

“We should be ahead of public opinion but we have to be within arm’s reach. If we get too far ahead, we lose our grip on public opinion, and we can no longer bring it with us.

“We’re not in this position because of trans people,” she went on to point out. “There was a very clear, well-co-ordinated, well-funded effort to demonise trans people, to stake out positions on fertile ground for anti-trans politics and to have those be the battlegrounds, rather than some of the areas where there’s more public support.

“We’re not in this position because of the movement or the community but clearly what we’ve been doing over the [past] several years has not been working to stave it off or continue the progress we were making eight, nine, 10 years ago.”

‘Blaming us for what’s happened’

Some trans people and allies were quick to criticise McBride’s stance.

Civil rights lawyer Alejandra Caraballo accused her of throwing “the trans community under the bus,” saying she believed the Delaware Democrat was trying to “blame us for what’s happening”.

Posting her criticism on Bluesky, Caraballo compared McBride’s words to articles “blaming people on social media for everything bad happening”, adding: “There’s this obsession with centrists that a few people on social media are emblematic of an entire diverse community. It’s brain rot.”

But others agreed with McBride’s sentiments. Comedian Stacy Cay argued that she had done “nothing wrong” and was “literally advocating for us”.

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