Democrats Need ‘Imperfect Allies’

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If this were not the 119th Congress she’d just joined, Representative Sarah McBride of Delaware might be having the best year of her life. Growing up, she focused on Washington with near Tracy Flick intensity. She built White House models in her childhood bedroom, interned for Beau Biden, and was elected president of the American University student body. When she came out as trans in her last year at AU, McBride figured her political career would get stunted. But she immediately landed an internship at the Obama White House, got elected to state Senate, and then on to Congress, all before turning 30. Dream achieved—except that she happened to land in a congressional class with members intent on making an example of her.

Before McBride arrived, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a bill that would forbid transgender women from using women’s restrooms in the U.S. Capitol. At McBride’s first hearing, Representative Keith Self of Texas introduced her as Mr. McBride. McBride is not new to harassment. She’s been badgered pretty much constantly since becoming an elected official. But getting trolled in the halls of Congress while trying to maintain her composure and get her job done is a new challenge.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Sarah McBride about how she navigates Congress, personally and politically, and how she thinks Democrats should navigate the culture-wars minefields.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: In November, two weeks after Representative Sarah McBride of Delaware became the first trans member of Congress, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a bill that would forbid transgender women from using female restrooms in the U.S. Capitol, which was McBride’s new workplace.

And when asked if this was in direct response to McBride’s win, Mace responded with, quote: “Yes, and absolutely and then some.”

Representative Nancy Mace: I’m not going to stand for a man—if someone with a penis is in the women’s locker room, that’s not okay. And I’m a victim of—

Rosin: Then last month, in March, at a House hearing—

Representative Keith Self: I now recognize the representative from Delaware, Mr. McBride.

Rosin: Representative Keith Self of Texas introduced McBride by misgendering her, to which she replied:

Representative Sarah McBride: Thank you, Madam Chair. Ranking member Keating, also wonderful—

Representative Bill Keating: Mr. Chairman, could you repeat your introduction again, please?

McBride: That is the biggest takeaway for me—one of the biggest takeaways for me—is how much Congress is, sadly, a reality-TV show.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Meaning that it’s performative?

McBride: Mm-hmm. And meaning that the goal of the day is to get airtime. And in order to get airtime, the easiest way is to use the strategies of folks on Bravo TV shows, where to get airtime, you pick a person, pick a fight with them, throw wine in their face, and that gets airtime. And that’s not only the strategy but really the defining feature of what is a win versus a loss for a lot of Republican members of Congress.

[Music]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Sarah McBride was making models of the White House in her room when she was 6 years old. Her big birthday wish, as a Delaware kid, was to meet Joe Biden. (She did, by the way, and he later ended up writing the foreword to her memoir.)

When McBride came out as trans in college, she worried that it would kill her political dreams. But it didn’t. She became the first trans speaker at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. She was elected state senator in 2020, then elected to Congress in 2024, at precisely the moment when trans issues became a singular fixation for her opposing party.

On President Trump’s first day, in his inaugural speech, he proclaimed that the government would no longer really recognize trans people.

President Donald Trump: As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female. (Applause.)

Rosin: Trump has signed executive orders that would ban transgender people from serving in the military, defund gender-affirming care for trans youth, block funding for schools that promote ideas of gender fluidity or transitioning. And just yesterday, the Trump administration announced that it was suing Maine for not complying with its push to ban transgender athletes in girls’ sports.

So here is Sarah McBride, living her childhood dream at the most inconvenient moment. And I wanted to know what that experience was like.

McBride: So I always knew, when I decided to run for this seat, that there would be some members of Congress who would use my service to score political points and gain attention. And I always knew that that would include misgendering.

Rosin: You did?

McBride: I just assumed that the performative nature of federal politics would result in people misgendering me. And one of the things I said to people during the course of the campaign is, They’re gonna try to do this, and my job is going to be not to give them the response that they want. And I go in every day focused on my job, focused on serving Delaware, focused on introducing now two and soon to be three bipartisan bills. But I also go in recognizing that at any moment, a member could decide to use my presence in a space to gain attention.

It doesn’t feel good when it happens. And the first time it happened was on the floor in my first floor speech. There had been some signs; people had sort of talked amongst themselves that it probably wouldn’t happen.

Rosin: What do you mean? You mean your allies had, in a comforting way? Or—

McBride: Yeah. I think there had been maybe some conversations among some staff.

Rosin: Okay.

McBride: And the tea leaves, they thought, suggested that it wouldn’t happen. So when it did happen the first time on the floor—

Representative Deborah Ross: Thank you, Madam Speaker. And I yield back.

McBride: —when I was introduced as “the gentleman from Delaware, Mr. McBride”—

Representative Mary Miller: The chair recognizes the gentleman from Delaware, Mr. McBride, for five minutes.

McBride: Thank you, Madam Speaker. When I was elected—

McBride: I’ve been intentionally misgendered. Before I came to Congress, I wasn’t getting misgendered pretty much ever. And occasionally, I would get misgendered intentionally, someone trying to score points. You know, I’d be in a parade, and someone would yell something out. That doesn’t bother me. I know they’re doing it in a way that’s crude, but it’s not news to me that I’m trans, right? I’m proud of who I am. That’s not a problem. I didn’t think it would be sort of emotionally heavy for me.

It is a different thing when it’s coming from the dais of the United States House of Representatives, right? It is a different thing when it’s in the congressional record. And that does hurt more than it would typically. I think, for me, in that moment, what hurt on the floor was: I could see people in the gallery snickering. And I’m a person, right? This is the first time I’m on the floor of the House of Representatives. I’m nervous to deliver my first floor speech. And so I just went into my speech and delivered it.

In the instance in committee where I did respond by saying, “Madam Chair,” to a man who was presiding—

Rosin: That was good. I was wondering, did she have that in her head already prepared, or did that just come spontaneously when you called him, “Madam Chair”? Because that was pretty good.

McBride: Well, I truthfully regretted saying, “Madam Chair,” right after I said it.

Rosin: Did you?

McBride: I went back to my office and was not happy with myself. It’s just not my style. I’m really here to focus on the job and to be serious. And you can have humor, and sometimes it’s right to just sort of respond in kind, but I don’t think I fulfill my responsibilities to anyone, whether that’s Delawareans or any other community I’m a part of, by consistently sinking to their level.

Rosin: It is a lot of pressure. It immediately popped into my mind: Jackie Robinson, tour of the South, sort of having to play—I mean, it’s a lot of pressure, I think, for you to be perfect. Look perfect, be perfect, act perfect, do everything perfectly. It seems like maybe that’s the pressure on a first, and you somehow recognize that, or you’re a naturally diplomatic person. I’m not sure, but—

McBride: I think that there is no question that there are added responsibilities, there is added pressure to a first. I would never compare myself to Jackie Robinson, but one thing, after I started, people recommended I watch 42. And there is a really powerful scene in the start, where the owner of the Dodgers says to Jackie Robinson, If you respond to a slur with a slur, they’ll only hear yours. If you respond to a punch with a punch, they’ll say you’re the aggressor.

Rosin: Right.

McBride: And I think that that is an apt description of the challenge that, really, most marginalized people face when entering a workplace. You know, at the end of the day, the way I try to think about it, though, is: The only way that I can guarantee that, while I may be a first, I’m not the last, is to just quite simply be the best member of Congress that I can be and to do the nuts and bolts of the job to the best of my ability.

I’ll make mistakes. There’ll be times where I should respond to things, and there are times where I shouldn’t respond to things that I won’t strike the right balance. I am going to make mistakes, and I think giving myself the same grace that I’m willing to extend to other people in navigating what is a reasonably unprecedented situation, where, you know, I’ve tried to look at other examples to learn from, and I haven’t been able to find someone who has entered Congress as a first when the identity that makes them a first is at the center of political debate and the district that they represent isn’t significantly or predominantly made up of that identity.

Rosin: Right? It is very unusual. You’re entering Congress at a time when trans people are at their most visible and their most vulnerable. Those two things are simultaneously true, and so that creates a maximum pressure cooker.

It seems from knowing your biographies, for a while, everything went well. Like, the boxes were getting checked. You came out: American University, people were supportive; 2013, you have a big role in the Gender Identity and Nondiscrimination Act in Delaware. There was a sense that we were at Trans 101, America was at Trans 101. We were just learning the language, understanding what transgender was. A lot of much younger kids, my own included, had a lot of experience with transgender friends and that we would move along to the graduate studies. And then it didn’t—well, do you still think that? I mean, do you still think it’s marching forward in that way?

McBride: I think we are experiencing a significant moment of regression culturally in this country on all issues of gender. Public opinion is worse now than it was on almost every issue than it was five years ago. And—

Rosin: Meaning what? Like, to what questions, for example?

McBride: Almost every conceivable question.

Rosin: Like transgender rights?

McBride: There are still trans-rights issues that have majority support, but every single poll I have seen shows less support now than there was five or six years ago—on pretty much every issue. From nondiscrimination protections, which still maintain majority support, to military participation, which still maintains majority support, to other issues that either don’t have, never have had, or now don’t have majority support.

And I think that there are a couple of reasons for that. One, it’s a sustained right-wing disinformation, misinformation, and fearmongering campaign that has an effect. And I think one of the things that people would say in 2015, 2016 to me is, Oh my goodness. It feels like we’re moving so quickly on trans rights, in a good way, right? And we’d praise it. And my reason for that was, I think I said at the time, and I still think this is true: I think there’s sort of a transfer of momentum from the LGB to the T, from marriage equality to trans rights, where people in 2015, 2016, right after marriage equality became the law of the land, they went, You know, I remember being wrong on marriage. And so there was that lesson of: Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean that you won’t ultimately support it.

And they kind of took that lesson and transferred it, at the time, to trans rights. And I think what it did was, it created a false sense of security. It created a dynamic where public opinion was sort of a mile wide but an inch deep. It was sort of a house built on sand in some ways. I think that because of that, we perhaps, as a community, didn’t do enough public education to build the foundation that the gay-rights part of the movement had built when they got to 2010, 2012, 2014 with progress on the issue of marriage—where that public support was rooted in a knowledge foundation, an understanding of who gay people were. And I don’t think that that foundation existed, or to this day exists, for trans people.

Rosin: It’s interesting because that’s also about the speed of information. I mean, the way information about gay people and gay rights happened was at a much slower pace, like Will & Grace, through television. It just kind of happened in this ambient way, and that’s not how information moves anymore.

I mean, I’m thinking of you in 2016, which is only a few years after that Delaware bill was passed, had that viral post where you wrote: “I’m just a person. We’re all just people. Trying to pee in peace,” when you took that selfie from the North Carolina bathroom. But I feel like you learned a lesson. That was maybe the first time that you learned—or maybe not the first time, but that you learned something from that that might inform what you’re saying now. What happened after that?

McBride: I mean, the torrent of hate that came in after that was really frightening and traumatizing for me. And after that experience, first off—

Rosin: More than you expected?

McBride: Much more. I just had never experienced that level of hate. Now it’s essentially an everyday occurrence, but—

Rosin: Really?

McBride: I mean, online it’s pretty incessant.

Rosin: To what, though? Like, any time you have a picture or your, like, X account?

McBride: Oh, anything I do.

Rosin: Anything.

McBride: I said the other week, I live rent free in some folks’ heads, and it’s—I will say stuff that has nothing to do with me, and literally just saying it will result in a torrent of anti-trans commentary. But it doesn’t bother me anymore, because of that experience that I had then, where I realized—so I got this hate, including a lot of people telling me I should kill myself.

Rosin: Yeah. What was the phrase? It’s “KYS.”

McBride: “KYS. KYS, KYS, KYS.” And I never would’ve expected that people telling me that I should do that would ever actually impact me. But at a certain point, the volume and velocity of it became so much that I couldn’t help but feel it. And I remember after this, I remember thinking, I don’t know that I can do this, do this work.

And I went on this sort of information adventure to understand the psychology and bullying of trolling. And I came across a This American Life episode that really just allowed things to click for me. It was Lindy West who wrote about her body and her weight a lot. And she would get trolled. And then she wrote about how much that trolling hurt her, and the troll reached out and apologized.

Rosin: Oh. Was this the episode where they actually talked to the troll?

McBride: Yes.

Rosin: And I will remember that episode forever because they talked to the troll, and it was very weird, that episode. The troll was like, Yeah. I don’t know. No biggie. I was just doing my thing.

McBride: No biggie. I was just doing my thing. And he acknowledged that he was struggling with his own weight.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

McBride: There’s the old cliche that the biggest closet cases are the biggest bullies. And in some cases, that’s true, but it underestimates a larger, more universal truth, which is that everyone has an insecurity. And the thing about LGBTQ people is that if we are out, we have taken that insecurity, that fear, that thing that society has told us we should be ashamed of, and we have not only accepted it but in many cases walked forward from a place of pride in it. And the bullies see that power—they see that individual agency and conquering our own fear—and they’re jealous of it.

And so when I see the things that people say about me writ large, the MAGA movement writ large, to me, I just think, I hope they find healing. And truthfully, one of the reasons why I do this work is because I think in this country, we so desperately need politicians who recognize that they don’t have to believe that people are right for what people are facing to be wrong. And we don’t have to believe that people are right for us to try to right that wrong. And I want to fight for people who look like me and think like me, and people who don’t look like me and don’t think like me and might even be saying really, really, really hurtful things about me, because we will all be better off if all of us heal a little bit.

Rosin:  I’m trying to decide in my head if you’re trying to convince yourself. I mean, that’s a very generous position, and I’m sure it costs you some. It’s a sort of generosity from on high, you know? I mean, maybe you’re all the way there. I don’t know. It’s a really hard position to embody.

McBride: There are times where I struggle with it. But one, I truly believe it, and it, frankly, makes it easier for me to deal with things to know that when people are saying those things, it is saying more about them than it is about me. And I don’t believe what they’re saying, so then I can sort of dispassionately remove myself from it and look and just say, What you're saying, Yeah, it’s not nice to me or people like me—

Rosin: But it’s about you.

McBride: —but it is not about me. I do think for some folks, the cruelty can be the point, but I do believe that hurt people, hurt people. And I do believe, yes, we’ve sort of gone down this rabbit hole of disinformation and misinformation, and it radicalizes people. But I think people are so much more susceptible to being radicalized when they are hurt and in pain and in fear.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: what happens to idealism when the vibes are bad, and how Sarah McBride thinks the Democrats can take back power.

[Break]

Rosin: So Trump’s executive order about there being only two biological sexes—have you developed any theories about why that is so important?

McBride: I mean, I try to—look: I don’t really think Donald Trump cares about this stuff. Donald Trump cares about what gets him more power and what gets him more money. I don’t think Donald Trump cares about trans people or LGBTQ people. I think people in his orbit do. I think he sees that some people in his base do.

It’s probably part of a legal strategy to lay the foundation to, obviously, not only eliminate the conception of nonbinary folks in law but to create a definition that lays the foundation for the government no longer validating or acknowledging or respecting binary trans identities.

Rosin: You’ve mentioned in this conversation hope. You’ve given a vision, which is extremely idealistic, particularly for someone your age. In general, though,

I mean, the vibes are off right now.

McBride: Yes. The vibes are bad.

Rosin: (Laughs.) The vibes are bad. You’ve also said that—how do you hold those two things at once? Like, once again, you know, if you look at you in 2013, things were looking like they were moving in a certain direction. You yourself have said they’ve kind of veered totally backwards, so how do you make sense of that larger historical arc and find your idealism in it?

McBride: Look—there are a lot of reasons right now not to be optimistic.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

McBride: But, you know, I think we often think of history and humanity as cumulative. We feel like we are the beneficiary of hundreds of years of lessons of history. But the reality is that unless you have lived it and experienced it, it’s pretty easy not to know it. You know, my generation, we grew up; we were born after the fall of the Soviet Union, right? We have existed in a world post–civil rights, post-1960s. And one of the things that I take comfort in, in this moment, having tried to take time to listen and learn about what it felt like to live in the times prior to the 1960s, is that the sense of inevitability that with hard work, change will come, that we have felt in a post-1960s world the sense that we were on this sort of unending cresting wave of cultural momentum—that is all the exception in our history, right?

Yes, we have every reason to fear that change won’t come right now, but you can’t tell me that the reasons for hopelessness now are greater than the reasons for hopelessness for an LGBTQ person in 1965, before Stonewall, when they maybe never knew of a reality where they could live openly and authentically as themselves without violating the law. Every previous generation, especially those generations prior to the ’60s and ’70s, faced seemingly impossible odds. They could not see the light at the end of the tunnel. Yet they persevered. They summoned their hope, they found the light, and they changed the world.

Rosin: Right. I think what you’re saying is, like, a zoom in, zoom out.

It’s like, how broadly do you want to see—like, the polls you mentioned maybe belong to the more narrow realm of optimism, but then you can put yourself in the broader spiritual, larger historical arc of hope, which is a different time span.

I want to drag you, though, back into this time span.

McBride: Yes.

Rosin: So we have four years ahead of us. There’s a lot of legislation. What are you tracking and watching? What are you looking at, and what are you worried about in the legislation?

McBride: I’m looking, frankly, beyond—I’m looking at everything. Because we’ve gotta recognize that all of these attacks are interconnected. I’m looking at the money that’s being stolen right now from farmers, from health officials, from federally qualified health centers, from food banks, from infrastructure funds in Delaware and across the country by the federal government. I’m looking at the effort to implement the largest cut in American history of Medicaid. I’m looking at the federal workers who are being summarily fired in Delaware and across the country because this administration is trying to grind government to a halt.

All of that comes together to try to create a world where people continue to be hungry and scared and fearful, which then lays the foundation for those fears and that insecurity to be exploited, to eliminate due process for both undocumented immigrants and legal immigrants in this country, legal residents, for them to target and scapegoat and fear monger around trans people. All of this is interconnected, and I don’t think that we can single out one of these areas. I certainly don’t have the luxury of doing that as a member of Congress.

Rosin: And so even though some of these issues are real things Republicans care about, and some, as you said, are performative and things they maybe don’t care so much about, is your instinct the Democrats need to focus more on the things they really care about, like, say, the shrinking of government versus the performative, you know, as you started out saying, Real Housewives-y kinds of things?

McBride: Well, I think there are two different worlds there. I think there’s their performative fights that are offensive, but the hurt is more narrow. Then there’s things that they don’t care about that they’re doing that hurt a lot of people. I don’t think Donald Trump himself cares about trans people, but he’s hurting trans people.

I do think Donald Trump cares about hurting immigrants. I think he wants to hurt immigrants, because I think Donald Trump—the through line of his entire political philosophy for 40 years has been anti-immigration. But I think those are two different things: things he doesn’t care about that have widespread harm, and things that he doesn’t care about that’s performative, that’s just about rallying up the base and where the harm is more limited.

I think, obviously, we should be pushing back against the efforts to sanction or mandate discrimination against trans people writ large in this country. We should be fighting back against efforts to insert government between patients, providers, and families. We should be protecting trans service members who are serving this country.

And in all of that, we should recognize that the most important thing for anyone who is being targeted by this administration is for us to slow this administration down. And unfortunately, because of the results of the last election, the main lever at our disposal is public opinion. We do have to recognize that we have to fight hard and fight smart, which means fighting and focusing on the issues where the public is with us, and therefore we can turn the public as quickly as possible against Donald Trump.

And it doesn’t mean we don’t fight on other things, but it means we put focus on the central case that Donald Trump made to voters and the issue that voters care about the most, which is their economic well-being. And if we can shift public opinion against Donald Trump as quickly as possible, it throws sand in the gears of Donald Trump’s authoritarian machine. Because right now we do live in a democracy.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

McBride: That is at risk. But we do live in a democracy. Public opinion still matters.

Rosin: I see. So am I reading between the lines here to kind of stay quieter on culture-war issues? Like, Don’t fight those fights right now. Don’t get into it. Don’t feed that fire right this minute.

McBride: I think we have to fight those fights in a smart way. And we need to message in a smarter way. Sometimes the message that is viscerally comforting to someone like me is not helpful, and sometimes even counterproductive, in reaching and convincing a person who is just tuning into this conversation or who has a diversity of thought.

We have to create space for some imperfect allies. We have to recognize that if we are gonna have 50 percent plus one in support of basic nondiscrimination protections, if we’re going to have 50 percent plus one in support of protecting access to medically necessary care, that, by definition, will have to include some people in the 70 percent who oppose trans people participating in sports. That conversation needs to continue with people, but we can’t dismiss them as bigots or remove them from our coalition, because then we will have a ceiling of 30 percent on any coalition and defense of anyone’s rights.

Rosin: Okay. A last thing: How have you learned to navigate Congress? The incidents we talked about were a couple of weeks ago. I’m really just curious—are there places you avoid, people you don’t get in the elevator with? I’m actually curious what your day-to-day life is.

McBride: My strategy is not to let any of this get in the way of me doing my job to the best of my ability.

Rosin: So you just, like, walk to your office, use the bathroom.

McBride: I don’t avoid anyone. Well, listen—I don’t give them opportunities to punish me because I violate the rule that Johnson put in place. I use the restroom in my office.

Rosin: Which she knew you would have.

McBride: Yeah. I don’t go out of my way to aggravate things. But I just do my job. If they’re going to misgender me on the floor, look—a lot of folks, they’re like, Sarah doesn’t make a stink when we just say, Member from Delaware, Representative McBride. It’s a way to respect Sarah. And it doesn’t make them feel like they’re saying something that they don’t want to say or that they feel like they’d get politically punished by gendering me correctly. Like, fine.

But there’s always a risk that someone wants to make a thing out of it. I’m not going to not go to committee. I’m going to go, and I’m going to speak. I’m not going to not go to the floor. I’m going to go to the floor and speak. And I’m not going to let them derail that work because they want 15 minutes of fame on social media.

I’m going to go in the elevator. I’ll say, Hi. If some of these folks pass me, I’ll say, Hey! How are you?

Rosin: In that folksy tone?

McBride: Absolutely.

Rosin: Uh-huh. (Laughs.)

McBride: How are ya?

Rosin: How are ya, sir? Oh, boy.

McBride: I’m not saying it’s the easiest thing, and I’m not saying I don’t get nervous, but, you know, it’s what I’m there to do, and it’s what I signed up for.

[Music]

Rosin: Well, thank you for coming today. Thank you for being honest and somehow remaining idealistic. I appreciate it. (Laughs.)

McBride: Always.

Rosin: Somebody’s gotta do it.

McBride: We’ve gotta have hope.

Rosin: Yes.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Andrea Valdez. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak, fact-checking by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com/podsub. That’s theatlantic.com/podsub.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.