When you talk to Delaware’s Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress, you quickly get the sense that her critics spend a lot more time thinking about her than she does about them. When she appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation in late November, several of her soon-to-be Republican colleagues had spent the previous week not just bullying her but advancing legislation that would force her to use the men’s bathroom in the Capitol; McBride, never one to take the bait, simply brushed them off.
“I didn’t run for the United States House of Representatives to talk about what bathroom I use,” McBride told host Margaret Brennan. “I didn’t run to talk about myself.” She ran, she said, to “deliver for Delawareans” on “the issues I know keep them up at night.” It was also a classic political redirect that she delivered again and again when asked about the vicious attacks against her by congressional Republicans. But McBride really seemed to mean it.
When we met at a Wilmington coffee shop the day after her Face the Nation appearance, McBride was arguably the most famous incoming congressperson in the country—all thanks to Republicans. In November, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a resolution to ban lawmakers and House employees from “using single-sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex.” When I asked about Mace’s crusade, McBride did acknowledge that it was something of a surprise. “While I always expected there to be an effort to politicize my service or even what restroom I use, it did happen earlier than I anticipated,” she told me.
Delaware’s congresswoman-elect said she thought the bathroom conversation would take place a “little closer to January.” Instead, Mace dominated the news cycle during the middle of November, when McBride and every other member-elect assembled in Washington for their freshman orientation.
As McBride was plowing through the mundanity of being assigned a Capitol Hill office and hiring staffers, Mace was disparaging her—often in absurd publicity stunts, such as taping the word BIOLOGICAL over the women’s bathroom sign and even selling anti-trans T-shirts—on a seemingly hourly basis.
But McBride insisted that Mace’s crusade did not change her focus over the course of her freshman orientation. “If anything,” she said, “I have gotten to know my colleagues even better over the last two weeks.” Mace’s bullying campaign, she argued, even had a silver lining: All the attention, she said, helped “elevate the needs of Delawareans and the issues that they elected me to work on even more than before.” Later in our conversation, the avowed Swiftie joked that Taylor Swift’s song “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” had lately been on her Spotify a lot.
Despite—or perhaps because of—her status as a trailblazer, McBride has always talked in measured, practical tones. Throughout her nascent political career—she is just 34 years old—she has avoided the hot-button culture war issues that increasingly define American politics, even as she herself has become a button. Dismissing the bathroom debate as a “manufactured culture war crisis,” she avoids taking the bait, and always pivots back to her constituents when asked about it. When I said that she’s likely to be viewed as an activist simply because of her gender identity, she immediately pushed back against my use of the word “activist.” Before entering electoral politics, she considered herself an “advocate,” not an activist, though she thinks both advocacy and activism have a part to play in creating change. But in her view, we “impose the word ‘activist’ on people of different backgrounds as a way of politicizing their background.”
Not everybody appreciates McBride’s levelheadedness. Some on the left, for instance, were upset that she didn’t fight more forcefully against Mace’s increasingly bigoted crusade. When asked about that criticism, McBride took a moment to collect her thoughts. “I understand why people want to see me fight that particular fight,” she began. “But that is exactly what the handful of members of Congress who have made this issue into an issue want me to do. I am maintaining my power and my focus and fulfilling what I believe to be the true responsibility that I have right now.”
McBride’s approach to politics is reminiscent of her fellow Delawarean Joe Biden—the senator, more than the president—who prided himself on his ability to reach across the aisle and work with those with whom he had significant disagreements. In the Delaware state Senate, where she served two terms, McBride worked regularly with Republicans on policies like expanding dental care to rural communities.
She intends to keep reaching across the aisle in Congress. Chris Coons, who has represented her state in the Senate since 2010, told me that one of her first requests of him was that he suggest Republican House members to whom she could reach out or to whom he could introduce her. “I thought that was a very good instinct,” he said.
McBride, in other words, is a compromiser (she would argue a coalition builder). She is definitely not a firebrand, and she never has been. Her gender identity makes her rapid political rise extraordinary, but the path she took to Congress is a familiar one.
A product of Delaware’s legendary Democratic machine, she first worked for Governor Jack Markell and Attorney General Beau Biden, the son of the future president, before being elected to the state Senate in 2020. As a legislator, she is a throwback: a devoted adherent of the all-but-lost art of political dealmaking.
But she is also a trailblazer. McBride may downplay her identity in interviews, but she’s never shied away from it. She came out as transgender during her senior year at American University, in a Facebook post that quickly went viral after it was republished in the school’s newspaper. After college, she worked on LGBTQ issues at the center-left think tank Center for American Progress, before serving as the national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign.
In 2016, she became the first-ever transgender speaker at the Democratic National Convention, where she delivered a speech that asked a question that still hasn’t been answered: “Will we be a nation where there’s only one way to love, only one way to look, and only one way to live? Or will we be a nation where everyone has the freedom to live openly and equally; a nation that’s stronger together?”
2016 was a pivotal year in McBride’s career. That year, she co-founded a volunteer network aimed at turning out trans voters for Hillary Clinton, and delivered a TED talk titled “Gender assigned to us at birth should not dictate who we are.” Most notably, she also made a rare foray into on-the-ground activism, posting a photo of herself in a North Carolina women’s restroom during the state’s “bathroom ban,” the short-lived, controversial prequel to Mace’s crusade on Capitol Hill. That selfie quickly went viral, making her a hero for the bill’s opponents—and a target for right-wingers who unleashed a torrent of bigotry and hate. The vitriol she received was overwhelming. That experience deeply affected McBride, but she rarely talks about it.
If 2016 was the year that established her as a public figure, it also marked a transition of sorts. Although McBride’s identity was central both to the work she did after college and to the initial public statements that made her a star as a politician, McBride rarely brings up her identity or her experience as a trans woman. “My job is to be an elected official,” she told me. “That is a different role than being an advocate or an activist.”
McBride launched a campaign for the Delaware state Senate in 2019 and ran on kitchen-table issues, not identity politics. In her announcement video, she talked about fighting addiction, increasing paid family leave, and making health care more affordable.
Running to become the highest-ranking transgender lawmaker in the country, she didn’t campaign on the fact that she was breaking barriers. When she was elected a year later, not much had changed: Her reelection campaign emphasized her effectiveness as a legislator and her bipartisan credentials, not her identity. The choice was less a matter of pragmatism than a statement of her values: Running in an overwhelmingly blue district, McBride would likely have won even if she had talked more about her identity.
Still, the impression that she never talks about herself is mistaken. Indeed, she often centers her identity when discussing her life and career. “My journey to running for office, serving in public office, in so many ways, for me has been a journey back to hope,” she told me. “As a young person... I think like a lot of young people, I felt alone. I worried whether the heart of this country was big enough to love someone like me. I feared that our politics couldn’t work for someone like me. And I faced a crisis of hope, and in that crisis of hope, I went searching for solutions and examples of our world becoming kinder and more just and more inclusive.”
It’s an answer that helps explain her tendency to pivot away from questions about her identity. Whenever she is asked about the one way she is different from her colleagues, she responds by subtly noting that she is, in fact, just like them. Some may spend their time concocting stunts to bully their colleagues, but she is there to work. In this sense, the simple act of doing her job can be seen as a rebuke to people like Mace who insist that she is fundamentally different and alien from other people.
It is also an answer that provides an origin story of sorts. Her journey back to hope was guided in part by Beau Biden, who passed away in 2015 and continues to serve as a model for her approach to politics. After she had come out at American University, Biden, then Delaware’s attorney general, “put a lot of political capital on the line … to pass a nondiscrimination bill that made it safe for me to come home to Delaware after college,” McBride said. Moments later, she added, “I’ve told [Joe Biden] this—there are two people who I think about almost every day and ask myself, ‘What would they do?’—my late husband, Andy, and Beau.”
Andy—Andrew Cray—was her other guide on her journey. The two met when she was interning at the White House, and Cray, a transgender man, would later help secure pivotal protections for LGBTQ people in the Affordable Care Act. They were married on the rooftop of their D.C. apartment building on August 24, 2014. Cray, who had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, died four days later.
The day after we met at a coffee shop, I drove to a nine-story community housing project just outside McBride’s former district (technically, it’s still her district, but so is the rest of Delaware), where the congresswoman-elect spoke to volunteers and residents at a rain-soaked turkey drive for people in need. Before her speech, she worked her way through the crowd, casually chatting with constituents about the challenges of staying healthy at Thanksgiving, and talked about how glad she was to be finished with orientation and back home in Delaware.
McBride had just made history. She had simultaneously been the subject of a multiday national firestorm and the victim of a vicious bullying campaign spurred by one of her new colleagues. She didn’t talk about any of that. Instead, she did what politicians have been doing for ages: shook hands, took pictures—all the old familiar standbys. In a certain light, she was a groundbreaking figure, someone who had just made history. But there was nothing exceptional about her. She was simply a politician working a room.
As I watched her, I remembered something she’d told me earlier—that she didn’t run to be a spokesperson for a movement or a trailblazer, but to represent Delaware in Congress. “Any responsibilities that come with being first are only fulfilled if I do that first responsibility to the best of my ability,” she insisted.
I got the sense, then as now, that journalists, pundits, and politicians were trying to put her into a box where she didn’t quite fit. It’s not that she ignores the box, but she understands the limits of it. Charlotte Clymer, a trans activist and former co-worker at the Human Rights Campaign, described McBride as “a student of history”: “She’s a huge nerd, she’s read all the biographies on great civil rights leaders…. She’s the kind of person who can converse with these great public leaders who came before us and really focuses on their example of centering patience [when faced with] outright hatred.”
Indeed, McBride’s brief tenure in Congress has largely been defined by misunderstanding—by a colleague intent on depicting her as something practically unhuman, and by media attention that depicted her as not just an icon but a spokesperson for a large and diverse group of people.
I watched McBride deliver her turkey drive speech twice, and neither time was there any talk of broken barriers or bathrooms. She praised the lead organizer—a hulking figure locally known as “Big Ive”—before telling the crowd, “The words that have been on my mind over the past couple of days have been ‘grace and goodness,’ and today we see grace and goodness on full display.” It was a well-tuned speech that seemed to fit both the occasion and, more subtly, the ordeal she had just undergone in Washington. On the stump, at least, McBride is a hell of a politician. When she finished, Big Ive tapped his chest and croaked, “I got all tingly inside; I feel like I’m going to church this morning. Gee whiz.”
When she was done speaking, we walked outside. The rain had finally quit, and a young Black man recognized her as he walked by. He said, “You are handling yourself so well. Already. Hasn’t even started yet.” It was a fleeting moment, but it captured what McBride had been telling me and practically everyone else all along—that she understands her constituents far better than many in the Beltway understand her.
