Transgender trailblazer Sarah McBride heads to her debut in Congress, hoping for a touch of grace

DOVER, Del. (AP) — It was her last day in session as a Delaware state senator, and Sarah McBride sat in her tiny office at the state Capitol, preparing farewell remarks.

She had made history here, as the first openly transgender state senator in the country. Now she was making history again, recently elected as the first openly transgender member of Congress.

Her political promotion has come during a reckoning for transgender rights, when legislation in Republican-governed states around the country aims to curb their advance. During an election where a deluge of campaign ads and politicians demeaned trans people, McBride still easily won her blue state’s only seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But even before she is sworn in on Friday, her reception from congressional Republicans has been tumultuous. Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina targeted her by proposing to ban transgender people from U.S. Capitol restrooms that correspond to their gender identity — a ban that House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., enacted.

For her part, McBride tried to defuse the situation, saying she would follow the rules. “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms,” the 34-year-old wrote in a statement.

While some activists want her to fight harder, to those who know her, the move was classic Sarah — a pragmatist with a reputation of bipartisanship, a person who values diplomacy over pugilism.

“There is so much joy and so much awe in having this opportunity, and I will not let anyone take that away from me,” McBride told The Associated Press. “I am simply there to do the job just like anyone else.”

Her political home of the last four years, the Delaware Senate, is small — just 21 members — much like the state itself, not even 100 miles (155 kilometers) from north to south. That proximity creates the kind of collegiality that, while not constant, is often lacking these days in Washington.

“We’re a family,” said state Sen. Brian Pettyjohn, a Republican colleague who walked over to hug McBride. “We’re going to disagree on a lot of things, but we don’t have the vitriol.”

In the Delaware chamber, there were last-minute nominees to confirm, and mundane business to finish during the Dec. 16 special session.

In between votes, McBride sat on her office’s burgundy couch, typing on her laptop. A staffer went through papers on her desk. The next day they would remove art from the walls and pack up prized mementos: a wedding photo with McBride’s late husband; a letter from former President Barack Obama; a photograph with the most famous Delaware politician, President Joe Biden.

Back down the hall, on the state Senate floor, McBride’s colleagues in the general assembly sent her off like the popular classmate at graduation. She opened the day with a prayer about “new beginnings and bittersweet endings.”

She ended with a speech of gratitude for her fellow state lawmakers.

“I take with me the hope that I have found here that despite the rancor and the toxicity that we too often see in our politics, that we do genuinely have more in common than what divides us,” McBride said.

She continued, “We can have a politics of grace and not of grandstanding, a politics of progress, not pettiness.”

Early promise and a meteoric rise

Growing up in Wilmington, McBride was the type of child who practiced Democratic political speeches in her bedroom at a makeshift podium.

By high school, she had worked on multiple campaigns, including that of Beau Biden, the president’s late son and former Delaware attorney general.

“She combines a passion for public service with a great intellect, with extraordinary political judgment and messaging ability,” said Jack Markell, the U.S. ambassador to Italy, a former Delaware governor and McBride’s mentor.

Though she seemed destined to work in politics, McBride once felt revealing her gender identity would derail those ambitions.

She was 21 and the president of American University’s student government when she came out as transgender, first to her friends and family and later in a public post that went viral.

Sitting in her Wilmington condo, McBride said, “Coming out was without question the hardest thing that I had ever done up until that point. And yet it was still relatively easy compared to the experiences of so many people.”

Her parents have been her biggest supporters, but they worried for her. One of their first calls after McBride came out was to their pastor, the Rev. Gregory Knox Jones of Westminster Presbyterian, a progressive church where Sarah was a youth elder and Jill Biden is a member.

“We talked about the fact that this was your child. You love your child,” Jones recalled. “You can’t think of losing a son. You’ve gained a daughter.”

David McBride, Sarah’s father, said that kind of support has made all the difference for their family. “Our life and Sarah’s life have been made by the response that we and she got first from our friends, our church, our community.”

McBride would go on to forge a trail through a rapid series of firsts. During college, she became the first openly transgender woman to intern at the White House. At a reception there, she met and later fell in love with a young lawyer, Andrew Cray, a trans man and LGBTQ+ health policy advocate.

As an activist at 22, McBride was instrumental in helping pass a transgender nondiscrimination law in Delaware. She worked as the spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, a leading LGBTQ-rights group. In 2016, she became the first openly trans person to speak at the Democratic National Convention.

To be a first, a historic first, is a privilege and a burden. McBride is quick to point out that she’s more than just the headlines about her gender identity.

“The reality is that I didn’t run to be a first. I didn’t run to make history with an election,” she said.

Her focus is to be the best member of Congress she can be for all of Delaware and the country.

It’s the “only way that I can guarantee that while I may be a first, I’m not the last.”

A show pony and a work horse

Before working with McBride, Democratic state Sen. Elizabeth Lockman thought “she was probably a bit of a show pony, so good at presenting herself, public speaking,” and already destined for a larger stage.

“Ok, she is the show pony, but can she be a work horse?” Lockman recalled thinking. “What I like to tell her is that she proved to us that she’s both. She’s probably one of the hardest-working people.”

McBride rarely stops to eat on busy days, instead subsisting on a steady diet of coffee, heavy on the cream and sweetener.

And nowhere is her boundless energy more evident than when she talks about the minutiae of policymaking. She likes kitchen table issues: health care, paid family leave, childcare and affordable housing. In the state Senate, she chaired the health committee and helped expand access to Medicaid and dental care for underserved communities. Most of her bills got bipartisan support.

Pettyjohn, her Republican colleague, appreciated that McBride would often seek conservative members’ input on legislation. “She’s always one to come over, to make that effort to get outside that echo chamber and say, ‘What can we do to polish it up some, to make it better?’”

Her signature accomplishment was helping pass paid family and medical leave in Delaware. It was personal for McBride.

Her partner Cray was 27 when he was diagnosed with oral cancer. Within a year, the prognosis was terminal. They moved up their wedding plans. They asked the Rev. Gene Robinson, a friend and the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, to officiate.

They married on the rooftop of their apartment building in August 2014. Cray died four days later at the hospital.

“The experience serving as a caregiver to him left me profoundly changed,” McBride said.

“I think about all of the people who have to deal with what we dealt with or worse, without health insurance, without family support, without paid leave, without jobs that allowed them to continue to pay their rent,” she said. “I just cannot imagine getting through even a fraction of what we went through without the support we had. It is a moral failing of our society and our country.”

A politics of grace

The word “grace” comes up a lot with McBride.

She does everything “with a lot of grace and patience,” Lockman said.

“She handled that with far more grace than I would have shown,” said Mat Marshall, a friend since high school, referencing McBride’s reaction to the congressional bathroom bill.

In her 2018 memoir, McBride wrote a chapter titled “Amazing grace,” about “beautiful acts of kindness” she witnessed during the last weeks of Cray’s life.

“A lot of times when people go through loss, it can be either faith-crushing or faith-affirming. And for me, it was faith-affirming,” she said.

In the room where Cray died, McBride felt God’s presence in a tangible way, like a hand on her shoulder — a comforting manifestation of God’s love that has never left her.

In the decade since, she often asks herself, “What would Andy do?” And she seeks to follow his example of compassion and “principled grace” toward anti-LGBTQ politicians. “His kindness, his decency has provided for me a North Star.”

Some activists have criticized McBride for not fighting back more forcefully against the Capitol bathroom ban. She agrees it’s important for transgender people to access public facilities.

“But the people who are talking about bathrooms aren’t trans people,” she said. “The people who are obsessing about bathrooms are right-wing Republicans who are seeking to stoke division and to distract.”

She said she will continue to respond with grace.

“At the end of the day, our ability to have a pluralistic, diverse democracy requires some foundation of kindness and grace,” McBride said. “And I believe in that so strongly that even when it’s difficult, I will seek to summon it.”

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