At a Democratic caucus meeting Tuesday, Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) watched as colleagues approached and offered their support to Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.), who will soon be sworn in as the first out transgender member of Congress.
“We have your back,” Balint recalled her fellow representatives telling McBride. “We stand with you.”
At a Thursday event where incoming House freshmen got assigned new offices, McBride’s name was met with the loudest applause.
According to Balint, co-chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, many Democratic members are excited to welcome and meet McBride — not just as a queer history maker, but as a new colleague whose reputation as an effective state legislator in Delaware preceded her to Washington.
The support has been intentionally loud, Balint said, because they also want to send an unequivocal message to House Republicans who have targeted McBride with bigotry and bullying in recent days that Democrats “are not going to retreat” on transgender rights.
“We have to absolutely recommit ourselves to this fight, for protecting everyone’s inherent dignity,” Balint said.
On Monday, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) filed a resolution calling for a ban on transgender women using Capitol bathrooms that align with their gender identity. On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced a similar policy for Capitol bathrooms, locker rooms and changing rooms. The same day, Mace filed a bill that would expand such bans to federal facilities across the country.
Mace said her measures, which would require approval, are to protect women and girls, then launched a new line of merchandise to profit off her stance. She has previously espoused support for LGBTQ+ rights.
In issuing his bathroom rule, which falls under his purview as speaker, Johnson said, “Women deserve women’s-only spaces.” He also noted that all members have private bathrooms within their offices — though those can be far from the House floor.
The day prior, Johnson had responded to a question about the issue by stressing the need to “treat all persons with dignity and respect.”
Access to bathrooms has long been an issue for women at the Capitol, which originally operated on the presumption that legislators were men. Only after more and more women won seats in Congress and called out the dearth of facilities for them did the issue get resolved.
With the latest measures targeting McBride, Democrats say they are struggling to combat fresh discrimination in the same sphere — a backsliding they view as particularly cruel for its targeting of a single incoming legislator, and extra alarming for its potential to harm other queer people who visit or work in the Capitol.
“This incredibly craven and cruel attack directed at [McBride] was certainly intended to dehumanize her before she has even been sworn in, but it actually doesn’t just affect our first trans member of Congress,” Balint said. “It impacts all of the people who work on Capitol Hill who identify as trans and nonbinary. It impacts the reporters who cover the Hill that identify as trans and nonbinary. And it also impacts every single one of our constituents who come into the halls of Congress to meet with us.”
Speaking out in opposition to the measures is about supporting McBride, who is “a serious legislator” and wants to get to work on a range of tough issues without having to worry about where she can get to a toilet, Balint said. But it is also about “showing the LGBTQ community across the country that we are standing up for them and pushing back.”
The debate follows an election cycle steeped in anti-transgender rhetoric, when many Republicans — including President-elect Donald Trump — took to ridiculing Democrats over their support for transgender equality as a central campaign message, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in collective ad spending.
“The Republican Party has laser-focused on transgender inclusion as something that it wants to roll back, and so the exciting addition of the first openly trans member of Congress has prompted a hideous response — which is [for them] to participate in an ad hominem attack that takes the form of exclusion,” said Kate Redburn, co-director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School.
Democrats have at times struggled to respond to the barrage of Republican attacks. However, in the last week, they seem to have landed on an approach out of McBride’s own playbook in Delaware — where she won a statewide congressional seat not by running away from her transgender identity and support for queer rights, but by contextualizing them alongside other important issues, such as the cost of living and access to healthcare.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) wrote on X on Tuesday that she is proud to serve alongside McBride, and that it was “disappointing to see Republicans pull stunts” attacking her.
“They should take a page out of Rep-Elect McBride’s book,” Pressley wrote, “and focus on actually governing.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), similarly questioned Republicans decision to start into the next Congress by “bullying” McBride instead of focusing on real issues. “This is what we’re doing?” he said.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who has a transgender grandson and has been outspoken against past anti-LGBTQ+ measures, hit a similar note in an interview Thursday, in which she called the Republican measures attacking McBride “absolutely outrageous” and “completely out of line.”
“What a ridiculous focus this is,” she said. “There are needs of many, many Americans who don’t have the healthcare that they need, seniors who can’t afford their medications. Those are the things that we should get to work on, that I’m sure Sarah would want to get to work on — and this is just off the deep end.”
In her own remarks, McBride has acknowledged what many view as the bigotry at the root of the Republican measures, but also tried to refocus the conversation on getting things done for her constituents.
“I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families,” she said in a statement Wednesday. She said Johnson’s rules were an “effort to distract from the real issues facing this country,” but that she wouldn’t let them distract her — even as she follows them.
On Thursday, she made clear that she will work to ensure Capitol Hill is safe for everyone, including her LGBTQ+ constituents, but doesn’t plan on allowing “a right wing culture war machine” to turn her identity “into the issue.”
Lisa Goodman, a longtime LGBTQ+ activist in Delaware and friend of McBride’s, said the representative-elect’s family and friends back home “are disappointed that this is how people who are going to be her colleagues are greeting her.”
But they aren’t worried, Goodman said, because they know McBride is uniquely capable of navigating such waters.
“She can handle these attacks and keep focused on what is the big picture — what is important in the big picture — like no one I have ever met,” Goodman said.
Goodman said McBride has a rare talent for winning over people, which will serve her well in the coming months, as she gets to know her new colleagues — Democrats and Republicans alike.
“She’s just a deeply good person, and my hope is that, as her Republican colleagues in Congress get to know her, they will see her as a person and not as some unknown member of the trans community who they feel it’s OK to attack,” Goodman said.
Balint said several Republican House members have told her in private that they support the LGBTQ+ community and don’t support divisive policies. She said she hopes McBride’s kindness and humanity in the face of such bullying will indeed bring those Republicans to her side — and maybe even inspire them to take a stand for her.
“It is their time to finally show some courage,” Balint said. “I’m asking them to stand up for the basic, inherent dignity of all of us here in this building.”
Times staff writer Andrea Castillo, in Washington, contributed to this report.