T wo weeks after her election to Congress in 2024, Sarah McBride heard rumblings of a bathroom ban—specifically, that Republicans were planning to restrict restrooms at the Capitol by sex assigned at birth. When she received this information, McBride was in her car listening to Taylor Swift ’s “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” She told me later that this was “a very fitting and poignant song to be on in that particular moment,” since the rumored ban was aimed at exactly one person: the nation’s first openly transgender member of Congress, her. News of the bathroom ban broke that night, and McBride said it “felt like a wildfire spreading.” Media attention wasn’t new for her; she’d been a Delaware state senator for the past four years, and before that, national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign. In 2016, she’d gone ballistically viral for posting a picture of herself illegally using a women’s bathroom in North Carolina. But this story felt different, higher-stakes. The United States Congress was about to make an issue of her body. It would generate days of national news. At that time, McBride hadn’t even been sworn in yet. She was in Washington for orientation: getting her headshot taken, learning the rules. In the following days, as she toured potential offices in the Longworth building, she’d see her face in newspapers and on TV. Mostly, the attention was frightening—pundits discussing her bathroom use or describing her genitals in graphic ways—but it could be funny, too. She once passed an intern with a phone up to his ear. “I could hear him saying, ‘Let me just make sure I’m getting this down: You’re much more concerned with a Republican in a bathroom than Representative McBride?’ ” About a year later, I sat in McBride’s dimly lit congressional office, on a gold floral couch beside a pink striped pillow embroidered with a quote from Bridgerton. It was January—bleak and cold—and the bathroom saga was fresh for her again; she told me she’d just spent the holidays “revisiting all of this, just for journaling purposes, to process and dispense it from my mind.” I offered that she must be angry. She paused for a moment and said, “I am angry about how other people are treated. I really can’t get angry about how I’m treated. I only have so much space.” McBride was sworn in by House speaker Mike Johnson, who supported a policy restricting restrooms at the Capitol by sex assigned at birth. Photograph by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images. It was Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2024 when House speaker Mike Johnson formally enacted the bathroom ban. McBride finds it difficult to describe “the cacophony of noise and feedback” she experienced that day. Still, she knew that this was an existential moment for her career, that however she responded, it would be her “main opportunity to leave a lasting impression in the public’s minds about who I am.” On her phone, she typed out a statement saying that she would comply with the rule, despite disagreeing with it. “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms,” she wrote. “I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down the costs facing families.” With her statement, McBride hoped to show the public that she wasn’t the one making an issue of her identity, that she’d come to Congress to work. But it rankled some on the left. To critics, refusing to fight the rule betrayed the trans community. It seemed like a cowardly acquiescence to bigotry, a failure to stand up for those less powerful than her—the trans interns or staffers or facilities workers who also use the restrooms at the Capitol but lack a congresswoman’s platform and prestige. Some felt that McBride was modeling that it’s okay, or even inevitable, to accept discrimination. “I feel like I just got pulled right under the wheels of the bus by someone I thought was trying to pull me out,” one trans woman told the Advocate at the time. Congress was about to make an issue of her body. McBride hears that criticism, but it hasn’t changed her approach. When I asked what she was proudest of accomplishing during her first year in office, she dutifully mentioned introducing five bipartisan bills—more than any other freshman Democrat this Congress—and the various ways she’s steered money to Delaware. “But I think the thing that I am proudest of,” she said, “is that in the face of a very clearly concerted effort to try to derail me and turn me into a caricature, I have remained disciplined and focused and tried to fight for a politics of grace.” A 35-year-old trans woman with an activist bent, McBride seems an unlikely ambassador for grace and tolerance and reaching across the aisle, but that’s how she’s positioned herself on the Hill. She believes that a diverse and pluralistic society requires relationships between people who disagree. She tries to listen to adversaries with real curiosity. She won’t cast out allies when they err. She thinks that her own humanity and vulnerability are her greatest persuasive assets, that being humble and open will accomplish more than being strident and loud. Grace, McBride believes, “is necessary to finding a path forward out of this deep darkness that our country finds itself in.” But it’s not at all obvious that she’s right. Michelle Obama’s old mantra, “When they go low, we go high,” is one explanation of how Democrats lost so much power to an increasingly erratic and authoritarian GOP. Some think grace provides cover for bad actors, that it handicaps Democrats in an existential fight. McBride disagrees, and I wanted to understand why. Before our first interview, McBride led me into the depths of her office, past a cluster of staffers who were laughing and joking about Waymos. (“We’re having silly-goose hour,” she explained. “We are an office that loves silly-goose hour.”) She wore a blue blazer over a taupe turtleneck, her congressional pin on a gold chain around her neck. Inside her carpeted private office, she asked if it was okay to skip the fluorescent overhead lighting in favor of a small table lamp. “We’ve been calling this West Wing lighting,” she told me, because the lights on the show are so dim. “It’s going to be either very bright or this.” Some congressional offices project power or accomplishment. McBride’s is a monument to relationships. The walls are hung salon-style with photographs of people who matter to her: Her gaggle of nieces and nephews. President Biden, who is now her constituent. Her late husband, Andrew Cray, who died in 2014. There’s a wood carving of the Capitol made by one of her brothers. Above the couch hangs a framed New Yorker cartoon—a gift from Senator Elizabeth Warren—with the caption “Despite all warnings, Pandora opened the comments section.” McBride grew up in a tight-knit, upper-middle-class family in Wilmington. She was precocious and obsessed with politics: crafting the White House from blocks in her bedroom, earning the nickname “the little President” at school. As a teenager, she volunteered for the gubernatorial campaign of Jack Markell, who would quickly become her mentor, and interned with Beau Biden’s campaign for state attorney general. By the time she finished high school, McBride had introduced Governor Markell at speeches across the state. For college, McBride chose American University—a campus drenched in political ambition—and ran for student-body president her sophomore year. She claims to have been the first candidate in AU history to knock on every single door in every single main-campus residence hall. It worked. In office, she was passionate about LGBTQ+ issues, like promoting gender-inclusive housing. If anyone asked where that interest came from, she would tell a half truth: that one of her brothers is gay. By this point, though, McBride understood that she was trans. She’d first encountered the notion at age ten, while watching Just Shoot Me! with her mom. In one episode, Jenny McCarthy appeared as a trans woman whose identity was played as a gag; the laugh track roared each time a man professed to be attracted to her. McBride intuited two things from McCarthy’s character: One, that other people like her existed. Two, that should she transition, she would essentially be seen as a joke. For a long time, McBride planned never to live openly as herself. But by the time she arrived in college, the burden of her identity had grown heavy. “I think it’s hard for people to conceptualize what it feels like to be in the closet,” she told me. “I’ve described it as a constant feeling of homesickness, but it was a homesickness that was so present and so consuming that it cluttered my mind. It kept me from being able to really live in the present, to enjoy what was happening around me and feel my emotions.” On Christmas Eve in 2011, McBride was at church with her family—the Presbyterian church in which she’d grown up, where she’d become an ordained youth elder—which she said would normally have been the “pinnacle of the year.” She loved listening to the choir sing and basking in the anticipation of Christmas, but that night the experience felt hollow. She felt nothing at all. Being in the closet, she realized, meant she was numb to all the best parts of the world. “In that moment, I decided that I really did need to come out,” she said, “because I was so done watching my life pass by and missing all that beauty and knowing that I wasn’t able to fully live.” The next day, McBride told her family that she was trans. Her parents were devastated. They cried and said things that didn’t feel good to hear. At 21, McBride had to reassure the people she loved and trusted most in the world that their daughter was the same person she’d always been, the same person they’d loved as their son. She believes it was grace that got them all through: their grace to remain curious and open to her experience, her grace to forgive their mistakes, to never shut down the conversation, to honor their grief and stay with them until they could affirm who she was. It makes sense for McBride to offer grace to her loving, well-meaning parents, but it’s less obvious why she would extend it to Republicans. The party has spent years vilifying trans people, making their rights seem absurd and cartoonish, and using their lives as an electoral wedge. Also, more personally, McBride has faced harassment from some of her Republican colleagues at work. When I arrived at her office for one of our interviews, McBride was stuck at the Capitol. She’d just returned from a congressional delegation to Denmark (“to try to prevent an armed conflict with the United States invading Greenland, which is an absurd thing to even have to say”), and all day she’d been voting on a gargantuan spending package to keep the government funded through September. When she returned from voting, it was already dark. She greeted me, sank into an armchair, and said, “I’m going to add some color to your story.” South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace (seventh from right, in white), who sponsored the bathroom ban, has misgendered and needled McBride (sixth from left, in glasses). Photograph by Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images. Something had happened that day, at an afternoon press conference on the Hill. Paris Hilton was speaking on behalf of the DEFIANCE Act, a bill to keep deepfake revenge porn from proliferating online. As usual, the cosponsors had formed a semicircle behind the podium. McBride stood at one end of the arc. At the other end was Nancy Mace. A Republican congresswoman from South Carolina, Mace is the progenitor of the Capitol’s bathroom ban. She’s been needling McBride since she was elected, persistently misgendering her and framing her as a predator and a threat. At the press conference, McBride said, Mace began “sort of heckling me, loud enough for everyone else to hear,” saying things like “There’s a man here” and “You’ll never be one of us.” (In a statement, Mace didn’t dispute that characterization.) As she always does, McBride simply smiled and waved. Later, on X, Mace referred to McBride by the name that she was born with and called her a “biological male.” “Just to be completely honest, the gender part of it doesn’t bother me,” McBride told me that night. “I don’t need their validation to feel confident in who I am. But what’s hard is it feels dehumanizing, because it is such a visceral exercise of dominance.” She stressed that these kinds of incidents don’t happen very much anymore. “The indignities have diminished dramatically, and that is a byproduct of the approach that I’ve taken. When I don’t respond, they don’t get attention and they stop.” “We don’t respond, they don’t get attention and they stop.” Last year, McBride told the New York Times that in a body of 435 shiny, ambitious people, members of Congress often struggle to stand out. On television, she said, a good way to get attention is to throw wine in somebody’s face. The person who gets hit can throw wine back, but then it incentivizes more wine-throwing. It “creates a beef” that becomes “a season-long story arc.” Responding to Mace’s bullying, McBride believes, would escalate the situation and make it look like a fight with two sides. But not responding creates a clear visual of who is the aggressor. It’s the playbook of nonviolent resistance, of people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. “I’ll be fine tomorrow,” McBride told me that night from her armchair. “Sleep will always solve everything for me.” She insisted that Mace is the exception, that most of her Republican colleagues try to be respectful and kind. There’s a distinction, she said, “between those who are committed to hurting other people and those who are still on a journey, who have complicated feelings, who might not understand every nook and cranny of an issue and therefore might come to a different conclusion than you—or might genuinely understand and still come to a different conclusion.” With those latter types, she believes, it’s been productive to engage. McBride’s first big, bipartisan political win came when she was still in college, plotting her postgraduate life. She thought that she might like to move home to Delaware, but back then, state law didn’t protect against discrimination based on gender identity. That meant that she could potentially be evicted from her apartment or fired from her job simply for being trans. During her final semester of college, she joined the board of Equality Delaware and decided to change the law. Top to bottom: McBride at a 2025 Pride parade in San Francisco (top) and speaking in favor of 2019 legislation to expand federal civil-rights laws to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination. Photograph by Meera Fox/Getty Images; photograph by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images. Throughout that spring, McBride drove between DC and Delaware, lobbying for the bill that would become the Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Act of 2013. In meeting after meeting, she asked state legislators—both Democrats and Republicans—to vote to protect her. Sometimes, that was painful. Lawmakers fretted about men in wigs assaulting little girls in bathrooms. One Democratic member announced that “if Jesus can love the leper, then I can vote for this bill.” Newly out, at age 22, McBride stood multiple times before reporters and lawmakers and advocates and adversaries to defend her basic humanity. The lawmakers who turned out to be persuadable weren’t necessarily those she expected. In the end, the bill became law with bipartisan support. During this time, McBride was dating Andrew Cray, a young lawyer at the Center for American Progress who worked on LGBTQ+ healthcare access. She’d met him in 2012, when she was an intern in the Obama White House. Cray was in his mid-twenties then and already influential; his work had been cited multiple times in the Affordable Care Act. Together, they debated politics and ethics. They coddled his cats. But in 2013, just months after McBride graduated from college, Cray was diagnosed with cancer. McBride took care of him. She married him in 2014, four days before he died. Years later, when she was a state senator in Delaware, McBride championed a paid-family-leave act, which became the largest expansion of the state’s social safety net in decades. She’d fought for it, in part, to honor Cray. His life and death had changed her. Cray was trans, too, and once he died, McBride found herself furious about all the days of his short life that he’d wasted living as someone he was not. His death helped her understand the preciousness of life, “the need for everyone to be able to live fully and freely, with as few regrets at the end as possible.” Someone else might have been hardened by that revelation. It might have made them more bellicose and uncompromising, raging at people and systems that stood in their way. But it wasn’t that way for McBride. She believes that true progress is won through persuasion, and that persuasion requires an environment of grace. Extending grace to those who are different, she told me, is “absolutely core to who I am as a person.” And difference, she stressed, encompasses more than just identity or lived experience: “It’s also difference in thought. In fact, that’s often the most interesting difference.” One of McBride’s more relatable qualities is her relentless consumption of coffee. Her Instagram bio reads, “Drinking coffee and delivering for all Delawareans.” She is known to prefer it from Wawa, with lots of Splenda and cream. “People thought the coffee thing was like, ‘We’ll make it part of the brand,’ as an inauthentic thing,” explained one of her staffers. “But no, it’s so real. She drinks, like, eight cups of coffee a day and doesn’t eat. She only eats at night. I don’t understand how she survives.” This matters because in the wake of chugging liquids, one often needs to pee. “In my office, I have a private bathroom,” McBride told me when I asked how she’s navigating the bathroom ban. But her office is a ten-minute walk from the Capitol building, where there are no public, single-stall restrooms—just multi-stall ones from which she’s effectively barred. The Capitol does have a handful of private offices, which are reserved for high-ranking members. One of them lets McBride use their restroom. For security reasons, she didn’t want to say who. Logistically speaking, the bathroom ban is not trivial for McBride. Members of Congress often spend hours at the Capitol, giving speeches or attending meetings or taking votes. She’s mindful to not over-hydrate when she’s working there. The whole situation stings. Those who “seek to push people to the margins of society” understand the power of a restroom, she told me, “because if you can’t use the restroom, it becomes a lot harder to go to work or to school, or to go out and about during the day. If you ban discrimination everywhere else but allow for discrimination in restrooms, it’s a pretty clean way of keeping people out of public life.” The bathroom ban puts McBride in a tough position. Officially, her job is to serve the interests of her constituents, which is a fairly demanding load; her district is the entire state of Delaware. She represents more people than any other voting member of the House. In that capacity, it probably makes sense to keep her head down and focus on her state. But McBride’s role is also symbolic. As the highest-ranking trans elected official in US history, she’s a figurehead for a social movement. It’s not just Delawareans who depend on her. Last year, McBride gave an interview to the New York Times’ Ezra Klein that ran under the headline why the left lost on trans rights. Lately, polling shows a rightward lurch on trans issues, and McBride argued that while this isn’t the fault of the trans-rights movement—it happened because of a concerted campaign by Republican politicians—the movement’s overall posture hasn’t worked. She said that they’d “lost the art of persuasion” and “overplay[ed] their hand” based on a “false sense of cultural victory,” because they thought Americans believed more strongly in trans equality than they did. This interview was not universally lauded by trans folks and their allies. Many were aghast that McBride had seemed so deferential to public opinion—that she’d suggested social movements should remain “within arm’s reach” of whatever the public thinks, rather than charging too quickly ahead. “It is just an unsustainable dynamic,” she’d said, for activists “to continue to ask elected officials to take these maximalist positions, to ignore where their voters are.” Some critics thought McBride was giving cover for a retreat on trans rights and playing right into conservatives’ hands; after the interview was published, Fox News ran a headline about how a trans member of Congress had just admitted that Democrats had gone too far. McBride’s actual critique of her party is subtler. In the run-up to the 2024 election, she told me, many elected Democrats didn’t publicly defend trans rights, not because they didn’t believe in them but because they were afraid to say the wrong thing. The left had become exacting and illiberal about speech, and in that environment, it seemed safer to remain silent. But that freed Republicans to fill the void, presenting voters with poisonous narratives about who trans people are and what protecting their rights might mean. Instead, McBride wants Democrats to be able to “engage imperfectly, but with goodwill and good intentions.” She stressed that “if we are going to defend some of the basic fundamental rights of trans people, we are going to need imperfect allies in our coalition.” The caustic tribalism of the past decade, she believes, has kneecapped Democrats and exacerbated the resentment that fuels Trump. “I don’t think we’ve seen the rise of the far right because we extended too much grace and compassion to people who disagree with us,” she said. And while many say it shouldn’t be a trans person’s job to offer grace, McBride thinks that sometimes it is. She told Klein that “change-making isn’t always easy, and it’s not always fair.” Across the United States, anti-trans policies are spreading. Idaho just enacted a bathroom ban that’s particularly severe; even first-time violators could go to jail. Many trans people are afraid right now, and to some, the symbolism of McBride’s presence in Congress isn’t enough. In 2024, Gavin Grimm—a trans man who sued his Virginia high school over bathroom access—wrote in the Bay Area Reporter that McBride has an obligation to fight explicitly for trans people, to pay forward the efforts of her forebears who made her current life possible. “No amount of attempting to ingratiate ourselves to the people who would sooner see us dead than happily transitioned is going to lead to our liberation,” he wrote. “There’s a beauty that exists in that discourse, in that dialogue, in that practice of democracy.” McBride acknowledges that, in Congress, she hasn’t chosen to fight for trans rights in the way that’s most “viscerally comforting” to some. “But fighting in this place looks a lot of different ways,” she told me. “Sometimes it’s public, sometimes it’s private. Sometimes it’s a speech on the steps of the Capitol talking about my own experience as a trans person. Sometimes it’s individual conversations with colleagues in my caucus and across the aisle.” When she said that, I was skeptical. Congress is gridlocked. Democrats are in the minority. Democracy itself appears to be slipping away. It would seem, under those circumstances, that private negotiation is foolish, that it would be substantially more effective to raise her voice. But that night, when I got home from our interview, the top story in the news was the enormous spending package that had just passed in the House. One aspect went almost entirely unreported: that original drafts of the bill contained dozens of anti-trans riders, including a ban on federal funding for gender-affirming care. The bill could have penalized hospitals for treating trans patients, stripped protections from queer kids in foster care, or barred public-school teachers from using their students’ preferred names. According to the writer Ari Drennen, this “would have represented the most sweeping congressional attack on transgender Americans in history”—except that not a single anti-trans provision appeared in the version that passed. Photograph by Stephen Voss. Lots of Democrats are responsible for that outcome, but Drennen gave particular credit to McBride, who spent months quietly fighting the riders, lobbying Republicans with whom she’d arduously built relationships. It’s the kind of victory that’s difficult to trumpet, since the gist is that nothing changed. But it cost something for McBride to have those conversations, to show up day after day and act as an ambassador for her own humanity, to absorb bigotry from the right and blowback from the left while asking her colleagues not to hurt people like her. At one point, I asked McBride if she ever feels that grace just isn’t workable, that it reaps too little while requiring too much. She said, essentially, no—that if anything, her experiences have made her more certain that people are broadly good, that they tend to grow when you give them a chance, and that she herself does, too. “There’s a beauty that exists in that discourse, in that dialogue, in that practice of democracy,” she told me. For her, grace is an invisible force that can move mountains. It can work miracles that might be difficult to perceive. Her whole life has convinced her that it’s worthwhile. Whether you believe her is a matter of faith. This article appears in the May 2026 issue of Washingtonian. T wo weeks after her election to Congress in 2024, Sarah McBride heard rumblings of a bathroom ban—specifically, that Republicans were planning to restrict restrooms at the Capitol by sex assigned at birth. When she received this information, McBride was in her car listening to Taylor Swift’s “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” She told me later that this was “a very fitting and poignant song to be on in that particular moment,” since the rumored ban was aimed at exactly one person: the nation’s first openly transgender member of Congress, her. News of the bathroom ban broke that night, and McBride said it “felt like a wildfire spreading.” Media attention wasn’t new for her; she’d been a Delaware state senator for the past four years, and before that, national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign. In 2016, she’d gone ballistically viral for posting a picture of herself illegally using a women’s bathroom in North Carolina. But this story felt different, higher-stakes. The United States Congress was about to make an issue of her body. It would generate days of national news. At that time, McBride hadn’t even been sworn in yet. She was in Washington for orientation: getting her headshot taken, learning the rules. In the following days, as she toured potential offices in the Longworth building, she’d see her face in newspapers and on TV. Mostly, the attention was frightening—pundits discussing her bathroom use or describing her genitals in graphic ways—but it could be funny, too. She once passed an intern with a phone up to his ear. “I could hear him saying, ‘Let me just make sure I’m getting this down: You’re much more concerned with a Republican in a bathroom than Representative McBride?’ ” About a year later, I sat in McBride’s dimly lit congressional office, on a gold floral couch beside a pink striped pillow embroidered with a quote from Bridgerton. It was January—bleak and cold—and the bathroom saga was fresh for her again; she told me she’d just spent the holidays “revisiting all of this, just for journaling purposes, to process and dispense it from my mind.” I offered that she must be angry. She paused for a moment and said, “I am angry about how other people are treated. I really can’t get angry about how I’m treated. I only have so much space.” McBride was sworn in by House speaker Mike Johnson, who supported a policy restricting restrooms at the Capitol by sex assigned at birth. Photograph by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images. It was Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2024 when House speaker Mike Johnson formally enacted the bathroom ban. McBride finds it difficult to describe “the cacophony of noise and feedback” she experienced that day. Still, she knew that this was an existential moment for her career, that however she responded, it would be her “main opportunity to leave a lasting impression in the public’s minds about who I am.” On her phone, she typed out a statement saying that she would comply with the rule, despite disagreeing with it. “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms,” she wrote. “I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down the costs facing families.” With her statement, McBride hoped to show the public that she wasn’t the one making an issue of her identity, that she’d come to Congress to work. But it rankled some on the left. To critics, refusing to fight the rule betrayed the trans community. It seemed like a cowardly acquiescence to bigotry, a failure to stand up for those less powerful than her—the trans interns or staffers or facilities workers who also use the restrooms at the Capitol but lack a congresswoman’s platform and prestige. Some felt that McBride was modeling that it’s okay, or even inevitable, to accept discrimination. “I feel like I just got pulled right under the wheels of the bus by someone I thought was trying to pull me out,” one trans woman told the Advocate at the time. Congress was about to make an issue of her body. McBride hears that criticism, but it hasn’t changed her approach. When I asked what she was proudest of accomplishing during her first year in office, she dutifully mentioned introducing five bipartisan bills—more than any other freshman Democrat this Congress—and the various ways she’s steered money to Delaware. “But I think the thing that I am proudest of,” she said, “is that in the face of a very clearly concerted effort to try to derail me and turn me into a caricature, I have remained disciplined and focused and tried to fight for a politics of grace.” A 35-year-old trans woman with an activist bent, McBride seems an unlikely ambassador for grace and tolerance and reaching across the aisle, but that’s how she’s positioned herself on the Hill. She believes that a diverse and pluralistic society requires relationships between people who disagree. She tries to listen to adversaries with real curiosity. She won’t cast out allies when they err. She thinks that her own humanity and vulnerability are her greatest persuasive assets, that being humble and open will accomplish more than being strident and loud. Grace, McBride believes, “is necessary to finding a path forward out of this deep darkness that our country finds itself in.” But it’s not at all obvious that she’s right. Michelle Obama’s old mantra, “When they go low, we go high,” is one explanation of how Democrats lost so much power to an increasingly erratic and authoritarian GOP. Some think grace provides cover for bad actors, that it handicaps Democrats in an existential fight. McBride disagrees, and I wanted to understand why. Before our first interview, McBride led me into the depths of her office, past a cluster of staffers who were laughing and joking about Waymos. (“We’re having silly-goose hour,” she explained. “We are an office that loves silly-goose hour.”) She wore a blue blazer over a taupe turtleneck, her congressional pin on a gold chain around her neck. Inside her carpeted private office, she asked if it was okay to skip the fluorescent overhead lighting in favor of a small table lamp. “We’ve been calling this West Wing lighting,” she told me, because the lights on the show are so dim. “It’s going to be either very bright or this.” Some congressional offices project power or accomplishment. McBride’s is a monument to relationships. The walls are hung salon-style with photographs of people who matter to her: Her gaggle of nieces and nephews. President Biden, who is now her constituent. Her late husband, Andrew Cray, who died in 2014. There’s a wood carving of the Capitol made by one of her brothers. Above the couch hangs a framed New Yorker cartoon—a gift from Senator Elizabeth Warren—with the caption “Despite all warnings, Pandora opened the comments section.” McBride grew up in a tight-knit, upper-middle-class family in Wilmington. She was precocious and obsessed with politics: crafting the White House from blocks in her bedroom, earning the nickname “the little President” at school. As a teenager, she volunteered for the gubernatorial campaign of Jack Markell, who would quickly become her mentor, and interned with Beau Biden’s campaign for state attorney general. By the time she finished high school, McBride had introduced Governor Markell at speeches across the state. For college, McBride chose American University—a campus drenched in political ambition—and ran for student-body president her sophomore year. She claims to have been the first candidate in AU history to knock on every single door in every single main-campus residence hall. It worked. In office, she was passionate about LGBTQ+ issues, like promoting gender-inclusive housing. If anyone asked where that interest came from, she would tell a half truth: that one of her brothers is gay. By this point, though, McBride understood that she was trans. She’d first encountered the notion at age ten, while watching Just Shoot Me! with her mom. In one episode, Jenny McCarthy appeared as a trans woman whose identity was played as a gag; the laugh track roared each time a man professed to be attracted to her. McBride intuited two things from McCarthy’s character: One, that other people like her existed. Two, that should she transition, she would essentially be seen as a joke. For a long time, McBride planned never to live openly as herself. But by the time she arrived in college, the burden of her identity had grown heavy. “I think it’s hard for people to conceptualize what it feels like to be in the closet,” she told me. “I’ve described it as a constant feeling of homesickness, but it was a homesickness that was so present and so consuming that it cluttered my mind. It kept me from being able to really live in the present, to enjoy what was happening around me and feel my emotions.” On Christmas Eve in 2011, McBride was at church with her family—the Presbyterian church in which she’d grown up, where she’d become an ordained youth elder—which she said would normally have been the “pinnacle of the year.” She loved listening to the choir sing and basking in the anticipation of Christmas, but that night the experience felt hollow. She felt nothing at all. Being in the closet, she realized, meant she was numb to all the best parts of the world. “In that moment, I decided that I really did need to come out,” she said, “because I was so done watching my life pass by and missing all that beauty and knowing that I wasn’t able to fully live.” The next day, McBride told her family that she was trans. Her parents were devastated. They cried and said things that didn’t feel good to hear. At 21, McBride had to reassure the people she loved and trusted most in the world that their daughter was the same person she’d always been, the same person they’d loved as their son. She believes it was grace that got them all through: their grace to remain curious and open to her experience, her grace to forgive their mistakes, to never shut down the conversation, to honor their grief and stay with them until they could affirm who she was. It makes sense for McBride to offer grace to her loving, well-meaning parents, but it’s less obvious why she would extend it to Republicans. The party has spent years vilifying trans people, making their rights seem absurd and cartoonish, and using their lives as an electoral wedge. Also, more personally, McBride has faced harassment from some of her Republican colleagues at work. When I arrived at her office for one of our interviews, McBride was stuck at the Capitol. She’d just returned from a congressional delegation to Denmark (“to try to prevent an armed conflict with the United States invading Greenland, which is an absurd thing to even have to say”), and all day she’d been voting on a gargantuan spending package to keep the government funded through September. When she returned from voting, it was already dark. She greeted me, sank into an armchair, and said, “I’m going to add some color to your story.” South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace (seventh from right, in white), who sponsored the bathroom ban, has misgendered and needled McBride (sixth from left, in glasses). Photograph by Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images. Something had happened that day, at an afternoon press conference on the Hill. Paris Hilton was speaking on behalf of the DEFIANCE Act, a bill to keep deepfake revenge porn from proliferating online. As usual, the cosponsors had formed a semicircle behind the podium. McBride stood at one end of the arc. At the other end was Nancy Mace. A Republican congresswoman from South Carolina, Mace is the progenitor of the Capitol’s bathroom ban. She’s been needling McBride since she was elected, persistently misgendering her and framing her as a predator and a threat. At the press conference, McBride said, Mace began “sort of heckling me, loud enough for everyone else to hear,” saying things like “There’s a man here” and “You’ll never be one of us.” (In a statement, Mace didn’t dispute that characterization.) As she always does, McBride simply smiled and waved. Later, on X, Mace referred to McBride by the name that she was born with and called her a “biological male.” “Just to be completely honest, the gender part of it doesn’t bother me,” McBride told me that night. “I don’t need their validation to feel confident in who I am. But what’s hard is it feels dehumanizing, because it is such a visceral exercise of dominance.” She stressed that these kinds of incidents don’t happen very much anymore. “The indignities have diminished dramatically, and that is a byproduct of the approach that I’ve taken. When I don’t respond, they don’t get attention and they stop.” “We don’t respond, they don’t get attention and they stop.” Last year, McBride told the New York Times that in a body of 435 shiny, ambitious people, members of Congress often struggle to stand out. On television, she said, a good way to get attention is to throw wine in somebody’s face. The person who gets hit can throw wine back, but then it incentivizes more wine-throwing. It “creates a beef” that becomes “a season-long story arc.” Responding to Mace’s bullying, McBride believes, would escalate the situation and make it look like a fight with two sides. But not responding creates a clear visual of who is the aggressor. It’s the playbook of nonviolent resistance, of people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. “I’ll be fine tomorrow,” McBride told me that night from her armchair. “Sleep will always solve everything for me.” She insisted that Mace is the exception, that most of her Republican colleagues try to be respectful and kind. There’s a distinction, she said, “between those who are committed to hurting other people and those who are still on a journey, who have complicated feelings, who might not understand every nook and cranny of an issue and therefore might come to a different conclusion than you—or might genuinely understand and still come to a different conclusion.” With those latter types, she believes, it’s been productive to engage. McBride’s first big, bipartisan political win came when she was still in college, plotting her postgraduate life. She thought that she might like to move home to Delaware, but back then, state law didn’t protect against discrimination based on gender identity. That meant that she could potentially be evicted from her apartment or fired from her job simply for being trans. During her final semester of college, she joined the board of Equality Delaware and decided to change the law. Top to bottom: McBride at a 2025 Pride parade in San Francisco (top) and speaking in favor of 2019 legislation to expand federal civil-rights laws to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination. Photograph by Meera Fox/Getty Images; photograph by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images. Throughout that spring, McBride drove between DC and Delaware, lobbying for the bill that would become the Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Act of 2013. In meeting after meeting, she asked state legislators—both Democrats and Republicans—to vote to protect her. Sometimes, that was painful. Lawmakers fretted about men in wigs assaulting little girls in bathrooms. One Democratic member announced that “if Jesus can love the leper, then I can vote for this bill.” Newly out, at age 22, McBride stood multiple times before reporters and lawmakers and advocates and adversaries to defend her basic humanity. The lawmakers who turned out to be persuadable weren’t necessarily those she expected. In the end, the bill became law with bipartisan support. During this time, McBride was dating Andrew Cray, a young lawyer at the Center for American Progress who worked on LGBTQ+ healthcare access. She’d met him in 2012, when she was an intern in the Obama White House. Cray was in his mid-twenties then and already influential; his work had been cited multiple times in the Affordable Care Act. Together, they debated politics and ethics. They coddled his cats. But in 2013, just months after McBride graduated from college, Cray was diagnosed with cancer. McBride took care of him. She married him in 2014, four days before he died. Years later, when she was a state senator in Delaware, McBride championed a paid-family-leave act, which became the largest expansion of the state’s social safety net in decades. She’d fought for it, in part, to honor Cray. His life and death had changed her. Cray was trans, too, and once he died, McBride found herself furious about all the days of his short life that he’d wasted living as someone he was not. His death helped her understand the preciousness of life, “the need for everyone to be able to live fully and freely, with as few regrets at the end as possible.” Someone else might have been hardened by that revelation. It might have made them more bellicose and uncompromising, raging at people and systems that stood in their way. But it wasn’t that way for McBride. She believes that true progress is won through persuasion, and that persuasion requires an environment of grace. Extending grace to those who are different, she told me, is “absolutely core to who I am as a person.” And difference, she stressed, encompasses more than just identity or lived experience: “It’s also difference in thought. In fact, that’s often the most interesting difference.” One of McBride’s more relatable qualities is her relentless consumption of coffee. Her Instagram bio reads, “Drinking coffee and delivering for all Delawareans.” She is known to prefer it from Wawa, with lots of Splenda and cream. “People thought the coffee thing was like, ‘We’ll make it part of the brand,’ as an inauthentic thing,” explained one of her staffers. “But no, it’s so real. She drinks, like, eight cups of coffee a day and doesn’t eat. She only eats at night. I don’t understand how she survives.” This matters because in the wake of chugging liquids, one often needs to pee. “In my office, I have a private bathroom,” McBride told me when I asked how she’s navigating the bathroom ban. But her office is a ten-minute walk from the Capitol building, where there are no public, single-stall restrooms—just multi-stall ones from which she’s effectively barred. The Capitol does have a handful of private offices, which are reserved for high-ranking members. One of them lets McBride use their restroom. For security reasons, she didn’t want to say who. Logistically speaking, the bathroom ban is not trivial for McBride. Members of Congress often spend hours at the Capitol, giving speeches or attending meetings or taking votes. She’s mindful to not over-hydrate when she’s working there. The whole situation stings. Those who “seek to push people to the margins of society” understand the power of a restroom, she told me, “because if you can’t use the restroom, it becomes a lot harder to go to work or to school, or to go out and about during the day. If you ban discrimination everywhere else but allow for discrimination in restrooms, it’s a pretty clean way of keeping people out of public life.” The bathroom ban puts McBride in a tough position. Officially, her job is to serve the interests of her constituents, which is a fairly demanding load; her district is the entire state of Delaware. She represents more people than any other voting member of the House. In that capacity, it probably makes sense to keep her head down and focus on her state. But McBride’s role is also symbolic. As the highest-ranking trans elected official in US history, she’s a figurehead for a social movement. It’s not just Delawareans who depend on her. Last year, McBride gave an interview to the New York Times’ Ezra Klein that ran under the headline why the left lost on trans rights. Lately, polling shows a rightward lurch on trans issues, and McBride argued that while this isn’t the fault of the trans-rights movement—it happened because of a concerted campaign by Republican politicians—the movement’s overall posture hasn’t worked. She said that they’d “lost the art of persuasion” and “overplay[ed] their hand” based on a “false sense of cultural victory,” because they thought Americans believed more strongly in trans equality than they did. This interview was not universally lauded by trans folks and their allies. Many were aghast that McBride had seemed so deferential to public opinion—that she’d suggested social movements should remain “within arm’s reach” of whatever the public thinks, rather than charging too quickly ahead. “It is just an unsustainable dynamic,” she’d said, for activists “to continue to ask elected officials to take these maximalist positions, to ignore where their voters are.” Some critics thought McBride was giving cover for a retreat on trans rights and playing right into conservatives’ hands; after the interview was published, Fox News ran a headline about how a trans member of Congress had just admitted that Democrats had gone too far. McBride’s actual critique of her party is subtler. In the run-up to the 2024 election, she told me, many elected Democrats didn’t publicly defend trans rights, not because they didn’t believe in them but because they were afraid to say the wrong thing. The left had become exacting and illiberal about speech, and in that environment, it seemed safer to remain silent. But that freed Republicans to fill the void, presenting voters with poisonous narratives about who trans people are and what protecting their rights might mean. Instead, McBride wants Democrats to be able to “engage imperfectly, but with goodwill and good intentions.” She stressed that “if we are going to defend some of the basic fundamental rights of trans people, we are going to need imperfect allies in our coalition.” The caustic tribalism of the past decade, she believes, has kneecapped Democrats and exacerbated the resentment that fuels Trump. “I don’t think we’ve seen the rise of the far right because we extended too much grace and compassion to people who disagree with us,” she said. And while many say it shouldn’t be a trans person’s job to offer grace, McBride thinks that sometimes it is. She told Klein that “change-making isn’t always easy, and it’s not always fair.” Across the United States, anti-trans policies are spreading. Idaho just enacted a bathroom ban that’s particularly severe; even first-time violators could go to jail. Many trans people are afraid right now, and to some, the symbolism of McBride’s presence in Congress isn’t enough. In 2024, Gavin Grimm—a trans man who sued his Virginia high school over bathroom access—wrote in the Bay Area Reporter that McBride has an obligation to fight explicitly for trans people, to pay forward the efforts of her forebears who made her current life possible. “No amount of attempting to ingratiate ourselves to the people who would sooner see us dead than happily transitioned is going to lead to our liberation,” he wrote. “There’s a beauty that exists in that discourse, in that dialogue, in that practice of democracy.” McBride acknowledges that, in Congress, she hasn’t chosen to fight for trans rights in the way that’s most “viscerally comforting” to some. “But fighting in this place looks a lot of different ways,” she told me. “Sometimes it’s public, sometimes it’s private. Sometimes it’s a speech on the steps of the Capitol talking about my own experience as a trans person. Sometimes it’s individual conversations with colleagues in my caucus and across the aisle.” When she said that, I was skeptical. Congress is gridlocked. Democrats are in the minority. Democracy itself appears to be slipping away. It would seem, under those circumstances, that private negotiation is foolish, that it would be substantially more effective to raise her voice. But that night, when I got home from our interview, the top story in the news was the enormous spending package that had just passed in the House. One aspect went almost entirely unreported: that original drafts of the bill contained dozens of anti-trans riders, including a ban on federal funding for gender-affirming care. The bill could have penalized hospitals for treating trans patients, stripped protections from queer kids in foster care, or barred public-school teachers from using their students’ preferred names. According to the writer Ari Drennen, this “would have represented the most sweeping congressional attack on transgender Americans in history”—except that not a single anti-trans provision appeared in the version that passed. Photograph by Stephen Voss. Lots of Democrats are responsible for that outcome, but Drennen gave particular credit to McBride, who spent months quietly fighting the riders, lobbying Republicans with whom she’d arduously built relationships. It’s the kind of victory that’s difficult to trumpet, since the gist is that nothing changed. But it cost something for McBride to have those conversations, to show up day after day and act as an ambassador for her own humanity, to absorb bigotry from the right and blowback from the left while asking her colleagues not to hurt people like her. At one point, I asked McBride if she ever feels that grace just isn’t workable, that it reaps too little while requiring too much. She said, essentially, no—that if anything, her experiences have made her more certain that people are broadly good, that they tend to grow when you give them a chance, and that she herself does, too. “There’s a beauty that exists in that discourse, in that dialogue, in that practice of democracy,” she told me. For her, grace is an invisible force that can move mountains. It can work miracles that might be difficult to perceive. Her whole life has convinced her that it’s worthwhile. Whether you believe her is a matter of faith. This article appears in the May 2026 issue of Washingtonian. The post Is Washington Ready for Sarah McBride’s Unrelenting Grace? first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less