Sarah McBride, speaks to the LGBTQ+ Caucus at the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 21, 2024. (Photo by Jacob Fischler/States Newsroom)
This story was originally reported by Orion Rummler of The 19th. Meet Orion and read more of his reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Sarah McBride was elected to represent Delaware. As the highest-ranking transgender elected official in the country, however, she is also being asked to speak on behalf of all transgender Americans. Every day, she navigates how to govern effectively alongside colleagues who don’t recognize her for who she is, as more and more trans people fear for their rights — and are looking to her to speak out.
But to make real change in this moment, she believes that she needs to choose her battles wisely — and so does the LGBTQ+ movement.
“We can’t continue to fight every fight on the Republicans’ terms and turf. That’s true for me as a member of Congress, it’s true for me as a Democrat, and it’s true for me as a trans person,” she said. In her view, it’s not just the LGBTQ+ rights movement that needs to change its strategy; it’s the progressive movement as a whole. They need to fight smarter, not harder, she said, especially under a second Trump administration.
She’s not going to take the bait about where she uses the bathroom; she expects that would just invite more attacks. And she won’t take up every fight that transgender Americans want her to; she’s not an activist, and she didn’t campaign on being one. McBride believes the best way she can change hearts and minds, including among her Republican colleagues, is by staying focused on the job she was elected to do for Delaware.
“We have to reclaim the narrative and the humanity in the public’s mind of trans people,” she said. “The most good that I think I can do is to be a full human being, to not be siloed and reduced to only one part of who I am, as proud as I am of that part.”
The day that President Donald Trump was sworn into office, trans and nonbinary Americans received a message from their new president: their identities are un-American. Two days later, The 19th sat down with McBride for an hour-long interview in her congressional office.
Inside, framed photos of her long career in Delaware politics overlook the couch and coffee table where she works. A photo of McBride and her late husband, Andy Cray, rests near a photo of her with former President Joe Biden. Water cups and coffee continuously populate the table that serves as her desk. An American flag hangs behind her armchair.
McBride is glad to be here. And she plans to focus on her own priorities, despite Republicans’ anti-trans agenda.
She became the first transgender member of Congress during the most fraught political moment for transgender Americans in the country’s history. As she was sworn into office at the start of January, anti-trans bills resurged in a Republican-controlled Congress that has levied personal attacks against her. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is reshaping the federal government to target and erase trans people from public life.
Last month, the House voted to ban trans girls and women from playing school sports with other girls. Democrats campaigned against the bill on the House floor, saying that it would put a target on the backs of all young women who play sports in school. Democrats gave impassioned speeches against the bill, which depicts trans women as men. McBride was not among them.
“I’m not going to let the Republican Conference dictate what my focus is, or what my agenda is, or in this case, what the first floor speech by a trans person in Congress will be,” McBride said. This bill represents an issue manufactured by Republicans, she said — not a real policy that needs to be legislated or debated. She wants her first floor speech to be on her own terms.
While House Republicans pushed a trans sports ban, McBride introduced her first bill — making her the first freshman Democrat to do so in the 119th Congress. She partnered with a California Republican, Young Kim, on a bipartisan bill to fight credit repair scams.
Despite the much-publicized attacks on her by congressional Republicans and the rampant transphobia displayed by some members, she said that behind the scenes, nearly all of her colleagues treat her with respect. She knows that most of them wouldn’t back nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people, but in that moment of interaction, that’s beside the point. In order for our country to move forward, she said, we have to be willing to work with the people we disagree with.
“I do think that over the last couple of years, we have fallen prey to approaches that feel viscerally comforting to ourselves, but do not ultimately invite people into our coalition to grow our ranks,” she said. “Our leaders, myself included, have to do what works, not what always feels great. Sometimes those things are in tension.”
Those tensions became apparent when McBride agreed to follow House Speaker Mike Johnson’s rule barring her from women’s restrooms on Capitol Hill. Many trans Americans pilloried her. Online, they called her a coward for complying instead of protesting. Some said that when it comes to trans rights, if Republicans are given an inch, they will take a mile. Others questioned why she would announce her position on the bathroom ban at all.
But McBride never planned to use public restrooms on Capitol Hill. She had privately made that choice shortly after winning her election, because she knew it wouldn’t be safe for her. And she had to respond to the ban publicly: it was targeted at her. If she didn’t say something, every brush with the hundreds of reporters circling the Hill would devolve into questions about where she uses the bathroom.
“I understand viscerally and emotionally why it is so hurtful for someone in the community to watch someone in the community face that policy,” she said. “I understand that when you are first, people viscerally live through your highs, and therefore they also viscerally feel the lows. So I get why people responded that way.”
Every day, trans people have to make compromises to survive and stay employed, McBride said, including in the face of policies that challenge their dignity. Those trans people need to focus on the job they were hired for because of how many eyes are watching them, including those looking for any reason to push them out.
“I’m a person. I’m doing the best I can,” McBride said. “I am not here to be a martyr. I’m here to be a member of Congress.”
During her congressional campaign and her time as a state senator, McBride was more interested in talking about policy than about her gender identity. To her, maintaining that approach is the best way to advance LGBTQ+ rights amid an onslaught of attacks on transgender people. On February 1, she brought that message to the annual New York dinner for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group in the country.
“Meeting people where they are is not selling out. It’s what this work is,” she said. “We have to connect this fight and these attacks to the broader economic needs of the American people. We have to pull back the curtain on the fact that they are using trans people as pawns in their broader effort to gut the federal government in order to line the pockets of Donald Trump’s best friends, all at the expense of working people.”
“I refuse to be used as a pawn. I refuse to give them that power, and I refuse to let them get away with it,” she told the audience.
As a transgender member of Congress, McBride does not want to be put into a box. She wants to work on the issues that got her elected: expanding health care and fighting rising costs of living. She’s on the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology and the Foreign Affairs Committee. In recent primetime TV appearances, she denounced the Trump administration not for its attacks on trans people, but for the administration’s attacks on federal agencies that provide crucial services at home and abroad.
On CNN’s News Central, McBride spoke out against the Trump administration’s plans to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, as “a gross and unconstitutional power grab” that will throw vulnerable women in oppressive regimes under the bus.
“If they can get away with this with USAID, they can do it anywhere. And that means that no part of the federal government, including programs like Medicare and Social Security, will be safe from this administration,” she told CNN’s Brianna Keilar.
Amid reports that House Republicans want to cut Medicaid to fund Trump’s policy agenda, McBride took to MSNBC’s The Weekend to denounce the proposal as “the great betrayal” from Republicans that promised to lower costs for families once Trump took office.
In the weeks after Trump returned to the White House, the federal government removed evidence of trans people from agency websites, denied trans Americans’ new passports, and proposed overhauling the U.S. education system based, in part, on the need to prevent kids from learning about being trans. Families of young trans people in Maryland, New York and Massachusetts have lost access to gender-affirming care following Trump’s executive orders. Trans people in the military are fighting to keep their jobs.
Before that avalanche of anti-trans policies took hold, McBride acknowledged the fear and exhaustion that so many transgender people are feeling. Their anger makes sense, she said. But in the face of so much vitriol, responding with calmness and compassion can be radical.
“Not only does it take the wind out of the sails of those who want to attack and foster conflict and politicize people’s very existence, but I think because of the very clear visual contrast, it can serve to open hearts and change minds and help to combat the disinformation, the misinformation and the caricatures that have been fomented by the far right,” she said.
That’s the strategy she wants to use in Congress. And, during a moment when transgender Americans are under attack like never before, it’s the one that she hopes will spark real change.