The full interview between Andres-Beck and Trans News Network contributor Tom Sayers is available below, with edits made for length and clarity.
TNN: How is the first week of the campaign going?
BAB: It’s been really great and to see what things are landing with people. I had guessed that a trans person running against someone who got national prominence for making transphobic remarks would be a story.
TNN: Was that your intention when you announced your campaign?
BAB: There’s just not that many non-binary public figures, especially not folks who have been out for 20 years—I’m sure that 50 years from now there will be a lot more publicly non-binary figures. One of the things I’ve appreciated, especially living in a sort-of small town, is being able to be out and be public about [being non-binary] which stops it being just something people talk about on the internet or that Fox News can make a monster-under-the-bed story about; because people actually know me.
TNN: Was there a particular moment that you decided to run?
BAB: It was a process of exploration. I wanted to take a leave of absence before next year’s election and work to help defeat Seth Moulton and I started looking around for what that looks like. I was just so frustrated with the way he’s undermining the Democratic party, in addition to the trans comments, voting to praise ICE and against impeaching Trump. So I wanted to do something about that; I talked to friends, family, people who I would ask to support me. I got really positive responses.
The next question: Well who can I get to work for me? The first person I asked said Absolutely, sign me up. I will be your campaign manager…’
Ultimately, what it came down to is: I’m not a conventional candidate. If this was a normal election in a normal time—say he was moving on to some other office or it was gonna be an open primary—I don’t think I would be the candidate but because this isn’t that election, there is a really strong story about how we have possibilities and capabilities we haven’t even imagined yet.
TNN: What kind of politician do you want to be?
BAB: I’m drawing somewhat from my professional experience in software…I want to be the kind of politician who can collaborate with the people who are actually around us. I think sometimes people have treated bipartisanship as either getting half of what you want or just supporting the Republicans. I don’t think bipartisanship is giving a mugger half of the stuff in your wallet. I think it’s about finding people who actually agree with us that this would be better.
TNN: What are you offering that will be different to your will-be opponent, congressman Moulton?
BAB: I think one of the differences is our goals: He has already run for Congress; he challenged Nancy Pelosi for leadership. To him, this is a career. Since business school at Yale, he spent one year as a president of a company in Texas, and then he moved back to Massachusetts to run for office.
I’m doing this because of what I can accomplish; because I want to make things possible in America that people have assumed to be out [of the question]—we can’t possibly have nice things—okay, let’s fix that so that we can have nice things. That’s my goal and I think that is profoundly hopeful; it gives us something we can work towards, that we can believe in that is worth going after and is worth all of this hard work. It’s not about my career—I like living in Middleton, I don’t want to move to Washington, D.C. full time; that’s not my goal in life. I want to be here to serve my neighbors and my community, and work with other people who also want to find hope.
TNN: You have a track record of serving people there.
BAB: Yeah, I got very involved in our Affordable Housing Trust, which we actually set up…It’s still relatively new but we’re buying tools for the library so people can [borrow them to] fix up their homes.
And it’s certainly not all Democrats in that group—the nice thing about local politics is that it’s not about scoring points or getting on Fox News tomorrow morning. [It’s about] what we can accomplish.
TNN: I was looking at your TikTok, and you follow just six people: Melat Kiros for Colorado, Kat Abughazaleh for Illinois, Zohran Mamdani for NYC Mayor, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. Are these people who you see as your political contemporaries?
BAB: I think there is a new approach to politics that is unlocking. We have these direct communication pathways with voters where you can build connections that don’t have to go through—clearly still cable news has much bigger viewership rates than anything on TikTok—but if you’re talking to 20 people on TikTok, you’re talking to 20 people in a way that you don’t get to do through the lens of someone else.
All of these people are experimenting with this, because we don’t know what it does yet. They’re all people who I see as being earnest and authentic…It’s not that I’m trying to shape myself into some political mould; it’s that I’m putting myself out there and saying ‘Hey, is this something you’d want? Feel free to come join me.’
TNN: I read in another interview the reason you think there’s so much pressure on trans people in sports, especially at the college level, is because there’s so much pressure on everyone else in sports because of competition for scholarships.
BAB: When you’re trans, people will bring up these issues…and I was realizing how intensely anxious people were about sports in general before you talk about anything with kids. When I was growing up, I was a trans kid playing sports, but it was very informal—we were playing tackle football with no pads and no helmets on the playground and kids didn’t care. It was weird that grown-ups cared. But, just for regular sports, the point was teamwork and sportsmanship. It mattered less if you won than how you played, and those were valuable lessons that I think every kid should have access to.
TNN: Do you think that politicians—yourself included—should be ‘meeting voters where they’re at’ when it comes to views on trans rights or our access to sports and bathrooms?
BAB: So, I think one question is: Which voters? Because when politicians talk about meeting voters where they’re at, there’s an implication that trans voters don’t matter; that the families of trans people don’t matter. Some of the fiercest support I have encountered is from the parents of trans children. We’re not just political props; we’re actual human beings…
It’s not about this one specific issue. It’s about whether the government should be deciding which children get to play sports, or tell you which healthcare you’re allowed to access; it’s about freedom. The thing I love about America is that it’s an experiment in pluralism in lots of different kinds of people living together, and we know that creates fiction and conflict. But, if we stay committed to that idea of America, we have a path through that isn’t trying to argue with these [transphobic] people; it’s saying these aren’t matters for the government, that’s not one of the arguments we resolve by passing a law.
We can also use [this framework] to pivot to the things we should be passing laws about, like how we provide public education for everybody, or how we make sure that kids have spaces where it’s safe to play outside and how do we keep children from being hit by cars. Those are the things where [the] government can be effective and supportive. There’s no right or wrong answer for what gender is.
This is one of the places I find my faith very useful. I'm a Unitarian Universalist—very Massachusetts, right?—and one of the things it does is help people sit with things that are slightly uncomfortable and realize that it’s okay not everything about the world makes perfect sense because we can have faith in people and our communities.
TNN: Do you think trans and gender non-conforming people need a more confrontational or educational approach in politics?
BAB: I don’t think people like school or being lectured. The way I think about it is that we need an audacious approach where we’re not afraid of being too much. Like, no, we should be celebrating that some people are weird and that’s good, because everybody is weird in some way and we should celebrate these things that make us different. And that is a very controversial opinion; that is an audacious thing to say.
I don’t feel the need to argue whether or not I exist because I’m here. I have already proven that I exist, I’m standing in front of you. So now I’m interested in what that does for people. When I end up in those conversations, I ask a lot more questions than I make statements because I already know myself—I spent 20 years trying to figure out if I was a boy or a girl! I have definitely thought about it a lot, and that’s not usually relevant to the conversation. Usually, I end up [realizing] people have all kinds of relationships to their own genders, their marriages or their relationships with their parents. They’re not thinking about kids in sports; they’re thinking ‘What does this mean for me if I didn’t have to do all these things [performing gender] that I thought I had to do.’
TNN: Do you think there’s people out there who want that type of approach across the board?
BAB: Oh I think people want that approach because it brings peace. It means that if I just exist, we don’t have to fight about that anymore.
TNN: How do you plan to engage with people in the House, probably mostly on the right, who genuinely believe, or purport to believe, that it’s sinful to be queer or trans and don’t want LGBTQIA+ rights enshrined in law?
BAB: I will certainly not start with arguing with them on that. I will start by working on all of the other things. If I can get them into a conversation, all of a sudden, they’ve already admitted that I’m someone to have a conversation with. And I think that’s part of why it matters so much that we’re in the room when laws about us are being made. So that they have to look me in the eye when they say something and I can be like, ‘Oh, really?’ And sometimes that’s all it takes for people to realize how ridiculous the words coming out of their mouth are.
TNN: How do you think Rep. Sarah McBride, the first openly trans congresswoman to be elected, is doing?
BAB: I don’t think there’s any right or wrong way to be the first person in a space because that is such a hard—you have to be exceptional to have gotten there at all. I have often been the most feminine person on a software development team, especially at the beginning of my career and [there’s a lot of] extra baggage that comes along with anything you do. So, whether or not I agree with McBride’s political goal, I think just by being there she unlocks possibilities.
I deeply admire people with the courage to stand up and just be. It’s something that I learned from my gay, trans, lesbian elders.
TNN: Do you see yourself as having a different political goal [to McBride]?
BAB: Well, because I’m not a conventional politician, and especially with my background as a software engineer, I know how to write software well, and government software mostly is not very kind to the users. We had [IRS] Direct File, which people love; the reports on it are fantastic and Congress just killed it because it made contractors slightly less money. And so we need people with the audacity to stand up to money; we need the people who are willing to not enrich themselves.
TNN: Now is maybe a great time to ask you about your funding. You’ve said you won’t take corporate donations. What are your fundraising policies? Would you take [money] from PACs?
BAB: The individual donations are going to be my primary path here, for sure. I’ m also not a person who has a super PAC sitting around with a million dollars in it…I’m relying a lot on the other people like me. At least the first round is people who want to see a different style of politics. People who want to see technical expertise and are frustrated with the questions that get asked of these CEOs.
I think especially in tech, a lot of us have made good middle class salaries for a long time—well the industry right now is going through a lot of layoffs, which is challenging for a lot of people–and we haven’t really had a place to invest in getting tech expertise into Congress, just because there aren’t options. If you spend 15 years doing politics, you are out of touch that was going on in tech anyway.
We don’t have privacy legislation in this country. My congressman [Moulton] was the co-sponsor of the TikTok ban. Instead of actually protecting users’ privacy with all of the software they use, they just went after the one company he didn’t like.
I don’t think people have to agree with everything I say to support this project because, if we can make this work right; if this approach of being earnest and authentic, and [campaigning] for what we can accomplish not what I can gain from it, we can get a very different kind of politic in America. And so anyone who wants to support some part of that with their $3,500 max [donation], it’s not going to be any one voice dominating the conversation.
TNN: If AIPAC came knocking, would you take [their money]?
BAB: Absolutely not. No. Right wing lobbying organizations—those people come in with money because they are trying to achieve a specific goal. I don’t think they would come knocking anyway.
I want to be able to represent the people in my district and I think it is particularly scummy when politicians take money from the companies they’re supposed to be regulating.
TNN: How do you see the connection between Palestinian liberation and trans liberation? Do you see any connection there?
BAB: The thing that stands out to me most about the recent movement for Palestinian liberation is the way that…it was young people coming together, organizing, that changed the national conversation; that disrupted the status quo. I think it’s really important for the Democratic Party to have a place for people who are willing to put themselves out there to do the organizing and to challenge the status quo. Certainly not everybody involved in the party has been welcoming of these changes. Not everybody in the party agrees with me that that’s what we should be doing.
I started in politics protesting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars at a time when that passed the Senate almost unanimously—shout out to Barbara Lee. The reason that I’m a Democrat is because at the time, even though people in the party disagreed with my position and thought I was hurting the cause by being patriotic or whatever, there were enough people who were also inviting me into the party…
I have friends in IfNotNow and I know people whose families have stopped associating with them and the grief is the same there as it is if your family stops associating with you because you’re gay or you’re trans. It’s something that matters so much that you’re willing to risk your relationships, because it’s that important. I think that’s probably the connection I see; the belief that something is so important that we are willing to do what we know we need to do, and then we’ll face the consequences whatever those end up being.
TNN: Do you think that Democratic support for trans rights cost the party the general election last year?
BAB: Absolutely not. Inflation cost us the general election last year; the fundamentals were not on our side. And it wasn’t just America; America’s election actually swung less dramatically against the incumbent than many other countries did…
We have to stop pretending ridiculous things are legitimate just because some people believe them.
TNN: Do you see inflation as the number one issue facing the country right now?
BAB: Well, now we’re back to target inflation. I think the affordability problems that are left are being caused by the chaotic tariffs, which are killing small businesses. People who play board games are very aware of the tariffs, because it’s gonna kill board gaming in America…
The power of tariffs is supposed to live with Congress to keep this kind of chaos from happening. I think we’re seeing the bad effects of tariffs, of the ethnic cleansing currently going on in America, on the economy and not on employers and on families and neighborhoods. None of these things are good for America; none of them are solutions to what people were worried about. But they’re what this administration has chosen to focus on.
We can’t just say we’re going to stop these bad things; we have to talk about building an immigration pathway that builds a working class rather than undermine it, economic policies that protect workers around the world, about making higher education affordable and supporting public education and here’s a lot of things that keep the federal government from being part of the solution to housing prices—that’s why I’ve spent the majority of my adult life with roommates. Like, that’s a very millennial experience because that’s how you had to do it.
TNN: Do you feel hopeful?
BAB: I do. I think it’s partially a practice for me. Finding hope is less about simply thinking everything is going to turn out okay; it’s knowing that you can help things turn out better. Fear of failure does not make us succeed more often; it keeps us from trying things that might fail. To succeed the most, often we have to be willing to try some things that might fail, and so the more we can make failure [happen]—as miserable as it feels—we can confront that fear of failure and do things anyway. I think that’s where I find hope; I do things that are worth doing regardless.
Then, sometimes you have opportunities like this where you have a chance to actually succeed and make a difference, and those [opportunities] are never accidents. It’s always because people have been doing work that they had no idea whether it would succeed or not before they started.