Sarah McBride didn’t give them the fight they wanted. She won anyway

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)

Everybody had advice

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’

The math of making a difference

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 says.

McBride is also “wicked funny,” Balint adds, and “is able to disarm people with her humor.”

Sometimes, the long game delivers a punchline.

On June 9, at Equality PAC’s National Pride Gala in Washington, McBride took the stage as results arrived from South Carolina’s Republican primary for governor. Mace was running fifth.

I was there as McBride gave the room her assessment. “I don’t like punching down, and I believe in the politics of grace. So all I will say is happy Pride, Nancy,” she said.

The crowd rose to its feet, roaring and cheering her on as she reveled in the schadenfreude.

When I bring it up in our interview, McBride offers a little of the philosophy behind the restraint.

“Listen, you got to play the long game,” she says, describing the eventual victory as “particularly sweet.”

Then, an understatement: “It was a nice moment.”

Her political conversations extended beyond Congress. According to a source familiar with her campaign advising, McBride spoke with dozens of candidates and incumbents nationwide about answering anti-trans ads without compromising their values. Most of them listened.

An analysis prepared by Pink and Blue Strategies for the Trans Freedom Alliance examined 1,188 Democratic digital and streaming-TV ads addressing trans issues or themes used to answer those attacks. Using AdImpact data compiled by AdHawk for January 1 through October 29, it classified $78.2 million in spending as pushback, compared with $1.6 million aligned with Republican positions—roughly 49 to 1.

Most of that pushback redirected the conversation without mentioning trans issues at all, while some took no clear position.

On a Human Rights Campaign press call Monday, McBride offered her assessment.

“This majority was not built by throwing vulnerable people under the bus,” she told reporters.

Related: Delaware voters send trailblazing transgender Congresswoman Sarah McBride back to the U.S. Congress

Delaware gets a congresswoman

For Brown, the economic issues McBride keeps returning to are thoroughly familiar.

“Yes, we were voting for our rights, but we were also voting for cheaper gas and making sure that we could pay for healthcare for our kids,” he says of trans voters.

McBride’s campaign took her to all 57 incorporated communities in Delaware in 57 hours, from Ardentown to Rehoboth Beach. The conversations returned to housing, food, energy, and the cost of making a living.

Her office reported helping more than 1,500 Delawareans and recovering nearly $6.5 million in delayed benefits and refunds by June, when it received the Congressional Management Foundation’s Democracy Award for Best Constituent Service in Congress.

“Sarah is damn good at her job,” Balint says.

Being known at home also offers McBride something she wishes more trans people could experience. She would encounter anti-trans hatred whether she held office or not, she says. But public recognition also brings strangers forward with kindness.

“I also see the kindness and the goodness that I wouldn’t otherwise get to see as frequently if I was not in this role,” she says.

She knows many trans people are getting only the other half of that experience.

“I wish I could just lift up a mirror to society,” she says, “so that society could see not the reflection of themselves on social media, but the actual reflection of them in real life.”

Brown cautions that visibility still leaves considerable work to do, particularly around understanding trans young people. While also electing many transgender candidates, voters also supported anti-trans ballot measures in Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska and Washington.

“I think there’s a lot more learning that people have to do around our issues,” he says.

Related: As the first out trans person in Congress, Sarah McBride is ready to fight for us

Back in the building

On Monday’s call, McBride marked another return to Capitol Hill.

“This is my first day back on the Hill since the election, and the vibes are excellent,” she said. “The vibes will be immaculate in January when we take over the majority formally.”

But her commitment to her constituents has remained unwavering.

“My promise to Delawareans this election was the same promise that I made two years ago, which is that I would work with anyone to deliver for Delaware and stand up to anyone whom I believed was hurting Delaware,” she says in the pre-election interview.

McBride wants a Democratic majority to investigate the administration while addressing the cost of living. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, whom she said at Crooked Con she would support for House speaker, selected her to help lead a caregiving working group. Her priorities include paid leave, affordable child care, and investments in home care and elder care.

Those policies have a personal history. Her husband, Andrew Cray, died of cancer in 2014, days after their wedding. The flexibility their jobs afforded them during his treatment helped her care for him — an experience that informed her advocacy for paid leave. In the Delaware Senate, she helped enact it.

Takano wants the next Congress to pursue the Equality Act and justice for transgender service members forced out of the military. He also wants to be clear about who is responsible for delivering.

Related: ‘State of Firsts’ captures the history of Sarah McBride’s rise as the first transgender member of Congress

“The burden shouldn’t be on her alone,” he says.

He wants the bathroom restriction reversed. Brown wants access restored for lawmakers and the people who come to petition them.

“We should get back to what we were doing before without any fanfare and just get to work,” Brown says.

For McBride, returning has already required work that no election result can measure. Two years after our photo shoot stopped, she can enter the Capitol with a comfort she had to rebuild.

“On the one hand, I am grateful that I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable there since then,” she says. “On the other hand, I think about the amount of personal work it’s taken to get to that place of being comfortable to go there.”