Sarah McBride

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After a first term of public cruelty and private persuasion, the first out trans congresswoman reveals what her restraint cost and what comes next.

Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Del., leaves the U.S. Capitol after the last vote of the week on Thursday, September 3, 2026.

Christopher Wiggins is the politics and news editor at equalpride, where he leads and shapes coverage across The Advocate, Out, and Them. Based in Washington, D.C., he oversees national reporting on the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, federal agencies, state governments, and the political forces shaping LGBTQ+ life in the United States.

A GLAAD Media Award-winning journalist, Wiggins has reported extensively on federal policy, civil rights, elections, the courts, and the consequences of government action for LGBTQ+ people, with a particular focus on transgender communities. His work includes cover profiles for The Advocate’s print magazine featuring U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware, CNN anchor-turned-independent journalist Don Lemon, former senior Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official Dr. Demetri Daskalakis, and former Vice President Kamala Harris.

In addition to directing editorial strategy, Wiggins continues to report from Washington on the institutions, officials, and movements defining the national political landscape, including the second Trump administration.

He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Instagram and Bluesky. Whistleblowers and confidential sources may contact him securely on Signal at cwdc.98.

On December 11, 2024, Sarah McBride needed a moment.

We were at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., for a photo shoot for The Advocate’s January cover story. A few weeks earlier, during new member orientation following her historic election, we had sat down to talk about the work ahead. She was preparing to become the first out transgender member of Congress.

Between that conversation and the photo shoot, Republicans had launched a campaign to keep her out of women’s bathrooms.

Photographer Mike Nelson had just set up to shoot at a window in the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building, with the Capitol dome visible in the distance. The shoot stopped. McBride stepped away briefly before returning.

What I didn’t know then was that she was having a panic attack.

“This place that I had worshiped for so long, revered for so long was the place that was causing me a panic attack,” she says.

McBride shares that memory in an interview three days before this year’s midterms. She remembers the shoot as her first return to the building after the bathroom ban.

From the outside, people mostly saw a woman keeping her cool. Some admired her restraint. Others wanted her to fight differently, more loudly, more visibly. Meanwhile, she still had to walk into the building.

Rep. Becca Balint, the Vermont Democrat who has become her friend, has been beside her for some of those walks.

“I’ve been with her when people have tried to verbally harass her,” Balint tells The Advocate. “I get worried sometimes that people expect someone like Sarah to be perfect all the time in what she says and how she says it and how she shows up.”

Delaware voters have now given McBride another term, with more than 64 percent of the vote against Republican Joseph Arminio. She even carried Sussex County, the conservative southern county she lost in 2024, with about 53 percent.

With Democrats taking back the House, McBride will return with two years of relationships and legislative experience — and an opportunity to show what she can do in the majority.

Related: Sarah McBride opens up about her darkest day in Congress (exclusive)

The confrontation began in November 2024, when Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina proposed a bathroom restriction targeting McBride. Speaker Mike Johnson imposed a ban in House-controlled spaces. McBride opposed it but said she would comply.

As The Advocate reported at the time and explored in a subsequent interview, some trans people wanted defiance. Her measured response left them feeling let down. McBride acknowledged that disappointment.

She was also thinking about colleagues she barely knew and votes she would soon need.

“I was sort of choosing between first impressions,” she says.

She decided to establish credibility with those colleagues so she could be effective “in defense of a community that included people who believed that what I was doing was a betrayal of them.”

Across our conversations, McBride has often explained that she does not want to reward attention seekers with a confrontation they can clip and circulate.

A source familiar with McBride’s thinking says she also feared that publicly emphasizing the ban’s effects on trans staffers, interns, and visitors would redirect hostile attention toward them. The source describes her calculation as an effort to avoid making other trans people in the building targets, too.

Jay Brown, the Human Rights Campaign’s executive vice president and chief of staff, has a succinct description of her predicament.

“I think the expectations for Sarah are very high, and I think the patience for Congress is very low,” he says.

Brown knew McBride as a student and later worked with her at HRC before she went on to elected office. He remembers her traveling around Delaware, explaining why nondiscrimination protections mattered to her.

“It’s not dissimilar to what it looks like to be a trans person coming out at work and having a conversation with your colleague,” Brown, who is transgender, says.

McBride makes room for demonstrations and public confrontation. But she occupies a position no other trans person in Congress does.

“As the only person able to fully do the inside strategy, it’s incumbent upon me to exercise the discipline necessary to be effective in that role,” she says.

Related: Sarah McBride explains how Democrats’ ‘big tent is bisexual’

Ask Balint, a lesbian, what this looks like in practice, and she describes huddles on the House floor, including comparing what they are hearing, discussing what allies could say, figuring out whom to approach.

Both came through state legislatures. Both represent entire states. Both understand a stubborn feature of representative democracy.

“Politics is, yes, it’s about winning hearts and minds, but it’s also fundamentally a math problem,” Balint says. “If you don’t have the votes, you got nothing.”

Rep. Mark Takano, the gay California Democrat who chairs the Congressional Equality Caucus, describes another calculation. Even a losing vote can matter, he argues, if the margin signals to the Senate that an attack lacks broad support.

The House, he says, is “like a live poll for the Senate.”

Takano, who is poised to become the chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee in January, credits McBride with helping colleagues who wanted to oppose restrictions but needed advice on explaining their positions back home. He watched her work before the House rejected an amendment in July that would have made President Donald Trump’s transgender military ban law. It failed, 212-217.

“I’ve personally watched Sarah on the floor helping to keep members inside the tent, our Democratic members,” he says.

Defeating that amendment did not end the administration’s ban. Other efforts fell short even in the House. In December 2025, McBride helped persuade four Republicans to oppose legislation criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors. Three Democrats supported it. The bill passed, 216-211, but did not become law after stalling in the Senate.

“My theory of change has always been about building relationships and trust, and through those relationships and that trust, opening hearts and changing minds and encouraging people to do the right thing,” McBride says.

Balint describes someone who listens closely and incorporates new information.

“She’s not looking for easy answers,” she say