“I love people,” says Becca Balint. “I love getting to know them. I love figuring out what makes them tick. I love laughing with them…. I love people, and I get energy from them.”

The U.S. Representative from Vermont is definitely a people person: personable, gregarious, cheerful, and willing to engage in conversation, whether it’s about serious, pressing political issues or more informal interactions, like cooing over her communication director’s pet dog, who briefly appeared on screen during the first minutes of our Zoom interview.

Born on a U.S. Army base in Heidelberg, West Germany, Balint, the daughter of a service member who was himself an immigrant from post-World War II Hungary, lived briefly abroad before moving stateside to Peekskill, New York.

As a child, Balint was frequently beset by health problems, including asthma, allergies, and digestive issues, which stemmed from feelings of anxiety and depression. Still, she was a sociable, humorous child who was able to win over her classmates with a friendly, welcoming personality. She was voted “Most Humorous” when it came to class superlatives and was elected class president in first grade and student body president in middle and high school.

“I was quirky,” she recalls. “In high school, my best friends and I decided to enter a lip sync contest, and the theme was the ’80s. People were doing Bon Jovi and Rush and Van Halen, and we did the B-52s’ ‘Rock Lobster.’ We had choreography. I was Fred Schneider dressed in a suit and wingtips. We actually won the contest because what we were doing was so unusual.”

The prize? “We won $100.”

Another time, just prior to being presented with a special leadership award, Balint shaved her head into a mohawk-style cut — something her father would frequently bring up to tease her. For Balint, though, it was just part of figuring out who she was and where she fit in the world.

“I knew at 11 that I was gay, and that was really hard for me,” she says. “Because I did not get messages in my family or community that said being gay was okay. In the ’80s, I still had teachers who used words like ‘faggot’ and ‘lezzy’ and ‘homo,’ and that was just considered acceptable. So you learn pretty early on to keep [those feelings] to yourself.”

Balint was on the receiving end of anti-gay bullying and harassment in sixth grade after revealing to one of her friends that she had a crush on her — news that obviously did not stay secret for long.

“It was horrible,” she says. “She shared a note that I had written to her and people wrote ‘Lezzy’ on my locker and called me ‘queer,’ which of course, at the time, was not a word being used in a positive way. And that was one of the things that drove me to become a ‘mean girl,’ because I saw how quickly you can become the pariah. So I stuffed down those feelings and thought, ‘That is behind me and I will never make that mistake again.’

“By high school, I had figured out how to be mostly myself. I was 75 percent myself, dressing the way I wanted to, hanging out with the friends that I wanted to, doing theater, doing sports, being outspoken. But I was still withholding that part of me that was absolutely sure that I was gay. And I didn’t tell my friends in high school until after graduation, because I just did not want to risk losing that support while we were in school. I didn’t come out to my parents until I was in college, and those were not easy conversations. They’ve come a long way, though. They’re very supportive now. But we had some rough patches.”

Our conversation inevitably shifts to politics, which Balint became involved in much later in life, in her 40s, after serving as a middle school teacher for nearly two decades.

“It’s amazing when I think back on how I was always drawn to politics,” Balint says. “There was a part of me in high school that wanted to go into politics, but I couldn’t imagine it for myself. I didn’t know anyone who had ever run for office. My mom’s family was working class. My dad’s family were immigrants. And the only out gay politician I’d ever heard of was Harvey Milk, and he’d been assassinated. And so I really thought to myself, ‘I don’t think this is going to happen in my lifetime.'”

The 56-year-old Balint, a mother of two high school-age children, credits her wife, Elizabeth Wohl, an attorney by trade, with pushing her to jump into the political fray.

“I’m lucky to have a supportive spouse who told me, ‘I don’t want you to look back and regret that you didn’t do the thing you were called to do,'” she says.

As an elected Democrat, Balint is concerned for the future of her party, which is struggling to find its footing and redefine its identity following Donald Trump’s victory in last year’s presidential election.

Many former liberals, from Bill Maher to Joe Rogan, and a number of elected Democrats, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, and Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman — the latter three of whom are viewed as potential 2028 presidential candidates –- have excoriated the party over its perceived embrace of so-called “wokeness” or “political correctness.” Those same figures have started to distance themselves from the left flank of the party, especially as it pertains to culture-war issues where Democrats’ positions don’t necessarily align with public opinion, such as transgender rights or visibility.

Balint, who is ideologically on the more progressive side of the Democratic spectrum, agrees that Democrats can sometimes get caught in a trap of trying to police language, saying it’s important for people on the left to give “grace” to their allies by allowing them to make mistakes and not abandoning, attacking, or “canceling” them for failing to express themselves in an ideal way.

“People aren’t going to say everything exactly right,” she says. “People aren’t going to be perfect. None of us are perfect.”

But Balint also worries that Democrats are learning the wrong lessons from their last defeat, incorrectly believing that copying Republican positions on social issues is going to endear them to the electorate.

“I do not think the Gavin Newsom way is going to bring us victory because I think people see it as performative,” she says. “It is important to be clear about your values and communicate and listen to your constituents, and give people grace. But that doesn’t mean you abandon the queer community or the trans community or people of color, or folks who have come here for a better life, people with green cards who are now being snatched off the street and disappeared.

“I do have concerns that the takeaway from last year’s election may be, ‘Oh, well, we lost the last election because of so-called wokeism.’ I actually think any Democrat who was coming after Joe Biden was going to have a tough time because people were hurting financially. If the takeaway for folks is that we should abandon our coalition and all of our allies, that is absolutely the wrong message.”

Balint also contends that conservatives have overused the politically-charged term “woke” to describe anything they don’t like, regardless of whether it actually fits the definition of the word.

“Wokeism has become whatever they say it is at any given moment,” she says. “And when did standing up for people’s rights and civil liberties become extreme? When did standing up for a shot at the American Dream and having some economic fairness — when did that become a radical idea? So we can’t accept the framing, and can’t talk as if making sure that the system isn’t rigged is some kind of woke idea.”

METRO WEEKLY: You started out your career in education. What made you decide to become a teacher?

BECCA BALINT: I can’t separate becoming a teacher from specifically wanting to teach middle school. That’s the age I was drawn to because those were the most miserable years of my life. That’s when I knew I was gay, but didn’t have role models, didn’t know what to do. I spent a lot of time at the library, reading everything that I could find about the experiences of gay people in America. It was a time when I felt very uncertain in my social connections in school.

I actually turned into quite a “mean girl” at that time because I figured out I didn’t want to be at the bottom of the pecking order. And in middle school, sometimes it’s kill or be killed. So I really thought about going back to teach middle school as a way to atone for the way that I had shown up in middle school, which was not very kind. It sounds very lofty, but I really felt like I owed a debt to society. I owed a debt to the people to whom I had been terrible because I had been just trying to protect myself.

When I first started teaching middle school, I realized, ‘Oh my gosh, I love this.’ These kids are still willing to laugh. They’re still willing to be goofy. They’re not fully formed. They want to be able to be good people, but they don’t know how to get there. And I felt like I understood those “mean girls,” I understood those bullies in a way, and I could reflect back to them the ways in which “I know that part of what’s going on for you is you’re trying to figure your own way out.”

It was much later when I was really drawn to the subject matter of teaching history and social studies. I actually took a break from my teaching to get a master’s in history because I felt like I had so much knowledge I wanted to have to be able to impart to my students, including that social movements happen because regular people decide to participate.

MW: What made you decide to leave teaching and enter politics?

BALINT: At the time, I think my daughter was in preschool, my son was in kindergarten, and I was watching their school dramatically increase the number of people living in poverty. And when 50 percent of the students in the school qualified for free and reduced-price lunch, I started thinking, “What can I do to help make the economics better for my home county in Vermont?” I got really interested in issues around workforce development and making sure that families understood the pathway for their kids to be able to have good jobs. It was one of those things where you open a little crack in a window and then that window opens wider and then doors get opened.

Through the process of investigating how to create a better economic environment for my county, I ended up writing weekly op-ed columns for the local paper. They gave me a lot of freedom, but I mostly wrote on economics, history, and culture. And that, unbeknownst to me at the time, actually introduced me to my entire soon-to-be Senate District. People felt like they knew me because I wrote this weekly op-ed column, which I then eventually turned into a book.

By the time I announced a run for State Senate in 2014, people felt like they already had this relationship with me. They understood what I thought about a lot of different issues.

I always let people know, especially people who might be thinking about running for office, that we often wait for the “right time.” But there’s never a right time because it’s always brutal. And in this case, our kids were little, and I said to my wife, “Oh, I can’t run for office now.” And she said, “The kids are always going to be our kids. They’re always going to need us. There’s never a good time. Just get your name out there.” She also said, “You’re probably not going to win.” And she didn’t say it meanly, but it was just like nobody wins the first time out.

Well, the joke was on us because I did. I won a hotly contested primary. And the State Capitol in Vermont is two hours away from us. So I couldn’t commute every day. During the week, I had to live up there, which was really hard. It was hard on all of us.

But for our kids, who are now in high school, this is what they’ve known for almost their entire life. I’m away for a few days, and then I come back home. We talk about my work. And when I’m getting ready to leave on Monday morning to fly to D.C., the four of us will huddle and say, “We’re Team Balint-Wohl.” We understand it’s a family project.

MW: Was there ever any worry that being gay might doom your candidacy?

BALINT: When I ran for State Senate, and later, when I ran for Congress, I put my identity front and center in my ads. I was not shying away from that, even though I had people in Vermont — where we had never elected a statewide out gay person or sent a woman to Congress — telling me not to. I had people advising me, “Don’t do it. Don’t put your wife in your ads. Don’t put your family in your ads.” My response was, “Look, if I can’t be myself in the way that I’m introducing myself to the rest of the state, then I don’t want to do this.” I would rather lose being true to myself than win by hiding my family in the background.

What’s interesting is that Vermont is very “people-sized.” You really get to know your community members. And things feel possible here. I believe that I was able to run for office and achieve the success that I had because I was in Vermont, and a lot of the people that ended up supporting me in my race for State Senate were families of students that I’d had.

I taught in four different rural public schools, and when you’re a middle school teacher, you meet a lot of people. There were a number of parents who would come into my parent-teacher conferences and say, “Thank God you want to be with my kid right now because I don’t. My kid’s driving me crazy.” The middle school years are so tough.

And I think it really helped me when I was running for office because people felt like, “I trusted her with my kid at some of the hardest times of my child’s life in middle school, and they felt supported in her classroom, and they thrived.” I think that having had that experience really helped me in my first race.

MW: One of your motivations for entering politics was combating child poverty. Your party, the Democratic Party — which created the social safety net on which so many people rely — has fallen out of favor with the working class. How do you feel about that, and why do you think that’s happened?

BALINT: I’m so glad you asked this. I actually think about it all the time, constantly. It is of deep concern to me. It is so painful to see this dynamic. It is the labor movement, the folks on the left, who brought us weekend and overtime pay, and all of the safety social nets. So I think it’s complicated and complex, but I’ve been able to tease out a couple things.

One, we have a right-wing media machine that lies constantly. There is just a sea of misinformation all the time, and we cannot discount it. We certainly saw it in the last election. We saw it with the “Stop the Steal” movement. But this is really something that’s been going on for about 25 years in earnest. It started with Newt Gingrich. The kind of tactics that Republicans use, and their willingness to stretch the truth — seemingly there are no consequences they paid for that.

So it’s been a long project of demonizing the Left, demonizing us as Democrats, as being weak, as being bad on the economy. Which, of course, the data is not borne out by that. The country does better under Democratic administrations. We’ve seen this, whether it’s looking at jobs reports, whether it’s looking at reduced deficits. The data’s there, but whatever, the facts and the truth don’t matter right now.

We also, I believe, have spent too much time lecturing and talking down to people in the tone that we use. I think we haven’t listened enough.

I had this conversation with young people right after the election that I can’t stop thinking about. I had agreed to give a lecture on leadership at a college, and I stayed after the lecture to have dinner with the students. And we were just talking, and I said, “Well, so how are you feeling about politics right now?” They said, “Ugh, we hate it.” They said, “On the one hand, we have a party that lies constantly, demonizes people, dehumanizes people, scapegoats, is craven in its cruelty, and we don’t want to be part of that.”

And then they said, “And on the other hand, we have a party” — meaning the Democrats — “that don’t give people grace anymore.” And I said, “Well, tell me what you mean.” And they said, “Well, we don’t want to show up at an event to try to raise money for folks who are homeless and be lectured by someone at the meeting for saying ‘homeless’ instead of ‘unhoused.'”

Now, these are young people, not just older Americans, saying, “I want people to understand I’m not going to say things perfectly right, I’m not going to do things perfectly right, but my heart is in the right place.” That was the first time I had heard it from younger voters, saying, “I don’t want to feel like I’m walking on eggshells all the time.”

So we have to listen more. We have to not use this air of superiority around us, this smugness. And I think that many in my caucus really are understanding this in a new way and really thinking about how we show up at these town hall meetings, how we show up for our constituents.

It’s going to take time. One thing that we have on our side is that Republicans have gone over the top with their smugness right now, and it is startling. It’s shocking the way in which they do not believe they need to be held to account for anything.

So we need policies that continue to show up for working people, we need to use language in the way that we’re showing up to bring a working coalition back together, and we have to have messages that are not about protecting the status quo. The status quo isn’t working for people. It’s just not. And so you can’t look at the fact that we’re in a second Gilded Age and think it’s okay.

We, as Democrats, can’t always be seen as the people who are writ-large protecting institutions if people think that the country’s institutions are failing them. So we have to do two things at the same time. We do have to stand up for Democracy, the rule of law, the separation of powers, while at the same time showing people that “we are listening to you, we care about your economic plight, and we’re actually going to do something about it.”

For me, sitting on the Judiciary Committee and the Budget Committee, I’ve been really clear in the kind of things that I talk about in those committees. For instance, when we look at antitrust, which we had a hearing about the other day in the subcommittee, I talked about how the algorithms that landlords are using are basically price-fixing and colluding to artificially drive up the prices for people.

We’ve got to deliver real receipts for people and help them to have a life that is more affordable. Nobody wants to feel like they can’t do it on their own. They just don’t want the system to be rigged against them — and it is.

MW: We’re seeing in the polls that the Democratic Party has the lowest approval rating it’s had in decades, but part of that is because a plurality or majority of Democrats are dissatisfied with how Democrats in Congress are responding to the Trump administration’s actions. So how do you communicate that you’re fighting on people’s behalf?

BALINT: I think what’s so hard right now — because of the way we do our work in Congress, and because so much news is shared on social media platforms — is that there’s a sense that there’s only a handful of people who are doing good work, and they tend to be our celebrity politicians. I hear that criticism when I’m back home in Vermont, and I always say, “You guys, not everybody’s a show horse. We need all different kinds of leaders.”

I think some people are workhorses, and they’re showing up every single day to do the work to make sure that you are able to get your veteran benefits or protect Social Security. And you’re never going to know their names because they’re never going to be darlings of the media, but they’re doing the work.

I think that this narrative that has taken hold — that Democrats are all a bunch of wimps — is counterproductive because it lumps everybody together in the same pile.

Now, I do think we should be asking really tough questions of anyone in leadership right now, about how they’re showing up, and whether they are correctly reading the mood of the country. I always say, “We need fighters, we need brawlers, we need people who are able to go toe-to-toe and not blink.” But we also have to accept that not everybody in the party is going to be out in front of the camera. Some people are building coalitions quietly behind the scenes.

I have also said that we do need to be cultivating younger leaders on the Democratic side. The Republicans have a rule in the House that you can only be a chair for so many terms. And I think it’s three terms you can be the chair of a committee. On the Democratic side, you can be a chair for decades. There is no mechanism to automatically give us that churn that gives you new blood in leadership. I think that’s wrong, and I think that’s not serving us. We certainly saw a number of younger people — meaning under 65 — running for chair positions. We need to see more of that. People need to be willing to cede control of the stage and let other people lead.

Lastly, we can’t continue to operate as a party that believes that you have to have every single “i” dotted, every “t” crossed, have perfect policy positions or 25-point plans. We need to be good at communicating our ideas [in an easy-to-understand way]. “Here are the three things. Boom, boom, boom. We’ll flesh out the details later.” People have to be able to associate us with a very clear brand, and they can’t right now.

Many of us within the House are having these conversations behind the scenes. We’re trying to figure out how to communicate what we stand for, and there isn’t going to be one leader that emerges that is going to check all the boxes. It’s going to take many different voices, bringing in a lot of different groups.

And so I have been, in earnest, really going to members of my caucus who are doing it differently, who are showing up in a different way than I do, but letting them know, “What you’re doing is effective. Keep doing that. Bring those people in. Your district is different from mine. You don’t have to say it the way I say it. I’m watching what you’re doing. That’s really good.”

There’s so much competition often in politics, and we have to get better about saying, “We’re all on the same damn team. We’re on the same damn team.” What Vermonters want from me is different from what folks in Oregon want from their elected officials. So why are you, as a Vermonter, judging this person in Oregon who’s trying to deliver for their district?

I get concerned about this lack of understanding of the actual mechanics of delivering for your constituency. What my people want from me, how they want me to show up, the way they want me to say things, and the issues they think are most important may not be the same for somebody else in another district. But that doesn’t mean that person isn’t a good leader, or a good American, or a good Democrat.

MW: You’ve recently introduced legislation to expand access to gender-affirming care for trans individuals, including youth. Obviously, this is a very controversial issue, not only externally but even within the LGBTQ community. Why did you introduce the bill, particularly at this time, when you know that trans rights is such a volatile issue?

BALINT: Because I think it’s the right thing. I’ve talked with families in Vermont and across the country that have kids who have come out as trans. And they have said to me, “I know that my child is going to live now because they’re getting the care that they need and deserve.”

I know this is a scary issue for a lot of people, because when we don’t understand something, when we don’t feel like we truly understand it on a deep level, people worry about whether we’re making decisions without all of the information that we need.

Here’s what I know: if you listen deeply to these families and these youth who weren’t getting the care that they needed, they will tell you their lives were in danger. They will tell you their depression and anxiety was incredibly high, that they didn’t feel they could envision a future for themselves.

Trans people are a very small percentage of the population, and you don’t have to understand everything about the lives of trans people to accept that they, like everyone else, are deserving of appropriate health care. I always try to point out to my queer or lesbian or gay male friends who say, “I just don’t know. I don’t get it.” I say, “Just remember all the people who said that about you, who said that about me.” We have doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and as I said, parents across this country who understand that this is life-giving care and there are lots of checks on the system along the way.

We did a hearing. It is one of the most disgusting hearings I’ve ever been part of. It was orchestrated by Republicans who are in charge. So this was all about a Judiciary [Committee] hearing to essentially beat up on trans people and their families. As Democrats, we got to call one witness, and the witness that we called to testify was a conservative Christian, Republican woman who was the mom of a trans kid. Her bravery was incredible. And she stood in that committee, swore an oath to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, and sat before that committee of Republicans who were demonizing her and her family.

And she was saying, “I am like you. I am a Republican. I am a conservative. I am a Christian. I go to church every week. I am telling you that you do not know what you’re talking about. This is what my child needed, and they are so much happier for it. I can’t convey to you enough how what you are doing is hurting me and my child and other families like me across the country.”

That was an incredibly moving moment for me, seeing her courage. And I feel like the least that I can do, in this moment of controversy, is be courageous as well and stand up for this community when a lot of people would like us to step back.

MW: How should LGBTQ people be responding to a society that seems to be turning against them, whether that’s corporate America turning tail and denouncing DEI?

BALINT: I believe in boycotts. I believe in targeted actions, nonviolent targeted actions. We need to vote with our feet. We need to vote with our dollars, absolutely. What we’ve seen from these companies is that they are cowards and that they only care about the almighty dollar. So we should treat them in kind. You want our money? You’ve got to earn it.

MW: How should LGBTQ Americans respond to their elected officials pushing to reverse some of the hard-fought protections that have been won? It’s quite obvious that some conservatives don’t intend to stop with walking back trans rights, as we see them targeting marriage equality and even pushing to bring back the sodomy laws.

BALINT: You are right. [The far Right] are going to come for marriage equality. They are going to come for our rights and our protections in employment. They make no joke about it. They don’t mince words. This is where they’re headed. What’s happening in parts of the world where authoritarianism has taken hold is what I fear is happening here.

So we have to stand together with all members of our community. We also have to seek out more allies outside of our community. It’s one of the reasons why I love being in the Equality Caucus in Congress, because there are 12 of us who identify as part of the community, but there are hundreds of other Democrats who stand with us as allies. And so we have to continue to build coalitions and not be insular, not be afraid, not stop speaking out and marching. We have to be louder. We all have to have some skin in the game.

I’m so glad you mentioned this, because you’re right, they may be coming for trans people today, but they’re coming for all of us. They’re coming for people who are undocumented and they’re coming for women. This is about dividing us, and this is a time when we need to be joining hands.

Becca Balint represents Vermont in the U.S. House of Representatives. For more information, visit www.balint.house.gov or follow the congresswoman on X at @repbeccab, on Bluesky at @balint.house.gov, or on Instagram at @repbeccab.