At age 6, Sarah McBride used building blocks to create a make-believe version of the place she dreamed to visit one day: the White House. McBride’s early dreams came true. She interned at the White House in 2012, during her senior year at American University — where she came out publicly as transgender at the end of her term as student body president. And at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, she made history, becoming the first transgender person to speak at a national convention.

McBride’s new memoir, Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality, describes her experience as a trans woman, helping Delaware become the 17th state to protect trans people from discrimination, and her relationship with Andy Cray — a transgender man and activist — who died of cancer at the age of 28, only days after their wedding.

McBride says addressing trans equality is a life-or-death matter. “When I think of families accepting and embracing their transgender children,” she told me, “I remember when a mom of a transgender daughter said: ‘When my child came out, I was faced with a decision — whether I wanted a happy daughter or a dead son.’”

I spoke with McBride, currently the national press secretary of the nonprofit Human Rights Campaign, about the issue of coming out as trans, the “empathy gap” of liberals, and the ban on transgender people in the military, among other topics. Read more via Vox