America’s first trans member of Congress isn’t taking Nancy Mace’s rage bait

With Republicans determined to make her arrival in Congress a spectacle, Sarah McBride is decidedly shutting it down as a “distraction” from their agenda.

America’s first openly transgender member of Congress has been far from the most vocal candidates on the Democratic side after their party sustained losses in the Senate and presidential races, while seeing the balance of power change little in the House.

But McBride, an incoming representative from Delaware, now finds herself in the center of the House GOP’s crosshairs.

Republican officials unveiled a bill that would specifically bar transgender women from using the women’s restrooms on Capitol Hill, a move that the resolution’s author Nancy Mace has said was explicitly aimed at McBride.

Mace, a bomb-thrower in the House GOP caucus, is now resorting to nodding along as a Fox News host openly taunted McBride and other transgender officials such as assistant health secretary Rachel Levine, as she contends for the spotlight after GOP victories in congressional and presidential races.

She posted a video of herself ripping down transgender flags around the Hill, she raged about trans people on social media in hundreds of posts within a matter of days, and she filed legislation to ban trans people from bathrooms that align with their gender at any federal facility nationwide.

“I know that’s not a woman!” Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy said in her interview with Mace on Sunday, referring to Levine.

Campos-Duffy and Mace repeatedly linked the congresswoman’s effort to ban McBride and other transgender people on the Hill from using the bathrooms of their respective gender identities to Mace’s survival of sexual assault.

They repeatedly referred to transgender women as “men” in the interview, and Mace also fired back at a Democratic congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who accused her of putting society on a path towards women and girls facing“inspections” of their genitalia before they are admitted into restrooms.

The Republican from South Carolina said that accusation was “disgusting.”

“That's really disgusting, and to say that about me, a survivor of rape and sexual abuse?” Mace remarked to Campos-Duffy.

But McBride is largely staying above the fray.

While she did make appearances on Sunday news shows this week, she did so while vowing to respect any resolutions governing restroom use passed by House Republicans in the Capitol.

”There’s certainly been a lot of noise around me, but I’ve remained focused,” she said in an interview on MSNBC’s The Weekend.

“It is an attempt to distract from what they are actually doing,” she added. “Every single time we hear them say the word ‘trans,’ look what they’re doing with their right hand. Look at what they’re doing to pick the pocket of American workers, to fleece seniors by privatizing Social Security and Medicare.”

McBride told Face the Nation on CBS that she ran for Congress in response to the experience she had caring for her late husband during his cancer battle.

“We both knew how lucky we were,” said the incoming congresswoman. “We knew how lucky Andy was to have health insurance that would allow him to get care that would hopefully save his life. And we both knew how lucky we were to have flexibility with our employers.”

She continued: “That allowed Andy to focus on the full time job of getting care, and me to focus on the full time job of being there by his side to care for him, to love him, to marry him, and to walk him to his passing.”

Some conservative members of McBride’s party — unhappy with Kamala Harris’s stunning election defeat against Donald Trump, and the blame being tossed around over the failure of Democrats to turn out younger voters and working-class voters — have urged the Democratic Party to abandon support for transgender rights in the wake of the 2024 election, echoing rhetoric that emerged from Republican officials and right-wing groups.

One of them was Tom Suozzi of New York, famous for taking back his district for the Democrats after his predecessor lost it to disgraced former congressman George Santos.

“The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left,” he told The New York Times after Harris’s defeat. “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.”