Hillary Clinton and Sarah McBride expose how weaponizing ‘scarcity’ drives anti-trans political attacks

The first out transgender member of the U.S. Congress took the world stage in Germany last week, warning that attacks on people like her and on LGBTQ+ rights more broadly are being weaponized in the current political climate, as she joined former first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on a high-profile panel at the Munich Security Conference.

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Rep. Sarah McBride, a Democrat from Delaware, participated in a town hall on Saturday titled “Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights: Fighting the Global Pushback,” a wide-ranging discussion that described today’s battles over gender and LGBTQ+ equality as part of a deeper contest between democracy and rising authoritarianism. Clinton opened by describing a global backlash against what she called “questions of dignity and identity,” one that now reaches far beyond any single country’s culture wars.

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In introducing McBride, Clinton praised her as a “gender rights champion” and for what her tenure in Congress means, noting that she has faced sustained attacks, including from fellow lawmakers, while maintaining what Clinton called “immense grace.”

Sarah McBride participates in the panel talk "Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights: Fighting the Global Pushback" at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany. Johannes Simon/Getty Images

McBride told the audience that the United States is not experiencing an isolated spasm of cultural anxiety but a coordinated, well-funded campaign that has placed transgender people “at the center” of a broader effort to roll back hard-won rights. The consequences, she argued, will not stop with trans communities.

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“At the end of the day,” she said, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, and sexism are rooted in the same belief, that “one perception at birth should dictate who you are, how you act, what you do, who you love, and how you dress.” When politicians use trans people as what she called “the tip of the spear,” the aim is not merely to marginalize a small minority but to normalize a wider regime of gender policing.

To make the point concrete, McBride recounted an episode from the House of Representatives in which a Democratic colleague was harassed in a women’s restroom outside of the House floor after being mistaken for her. The colleague, she said, had shoulder-length hair and glasses—enough, in that moment, to trigger the suspicions of Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert and South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, though McBride did not name them in her retelling of the story. The confrontation only ended when the Republicans realized they had targeted the wrong person. The incident, McBride argued, revealed how quickly rules ostensibly aimed at trans people turn into a broader enforcement of narrow and punitive ideas about womanhood—ones that disproportionately harm cisgender women as well.

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“Gender equality is a barometer of democratic stability,” McBride said. In times of economic and social strain, she warned, strongman politics feeds on scarcity: scarcity of jobs, of opportunity, of belonging, and looks for scapegoats. First, it is immigrants or trans people, she said. Increasingly, it is women as a whole who are blamed for taking opportunities that rightfully belong to someone else.

Hillary Clinton moderates the panel talk "Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights: Fighting the Global Pushback" at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2026 in Munich, Germany. Johannes Simon/Getty Images

The panel placed McBride’s warning within a wider international frame. Neil Datta, founder and executive director of the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights, told the audience that funding for anti-gender movements in Europe has exploded over the past decade, rising from roughly $20 million in 2009 to about $250 million by 2023. What once looked like scattered local resistance, he said, has hardened into a transnational political strategy—one that uses gender as both a target and a tool.

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Clinton echoed that assessment, arguing that the backlash is not a spontaneous uprising but a “carefully planned” effort to turn gender and LGBTQ+ issues into political wedges. She pointed to Russia’s long-running crackdowns on LGBTQ+ communities and rollbacks of protections for women as early examples of how such campaigns are used to consolidate power and weaken democratic norms.

Other panelists expanded the lens further still. Human rights leaders spoke about the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and the way attacks on women’s bodies are used to fracture entire societies. European lawmakers described efforts to enshrine abortion rights in constitutional law as a hedge against democratic backsliding, and warned that civil society organizations, which are often the first line of defense for vulnerable communities, are increasingly under financial and political siege.

Watch Sarah McBride and Hilary Clinton in conversation at the Munich Security Conference below.

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