Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Del., may be the first openly transgender member of Congress, but the historic nature of her role is something she rarely addresses publicly.
That changed Wednesday, when McBride spoke out in highly personal terms against two anti-trans bills that House Republicans are trying to push through before leaving for a holiday break on Friday.
“All Republican politicians care about is making the rich richer and attacking trans people,” McBride told reporters on the steps of the Capitol. “They are obsessed with trans people. I actually think they think more about trans people than trans people think about trans people. They are consumed with this, and they are extreme on it.”
One bill — which was introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and passed Wednesday by the House, 216 to 211 — would make it a felony, punishable by up to a decade in prison, for doctors to perform gender-affirming care on minors or for parents to consent to or facilitate such care for their kids. That includes reversible puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries.
Research has shown that only a tiny fraction of transgender minors —less than half of one percent — receive gender-affirming medications, and that surgeries in particular are nearly nonexistent on young people. Leading medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, support access to gender-affirming care, including for minors, and oppose efforts to restrict it.
But Republicans — including President Donald Trump — have continued to campaign against gender-affirming medical care and pass bans in dozens of states across the country. Polling also suggests a majority of Americans have grown to support bans on providing gender-affirming care to minors.
Greene’s bill had more than 40 Republican co-sponsors. Last week, Greene said in a post on X that House leadership promised her a vote on the legislation after she changed her vote from “no” to “yes” on the defense bill, which passed the House last week and the Senate on Wednesday. Greene’s bill is unlikely to pass the Senate, given that it would require Democrats’ support.
Advocacy groups — including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign and Advocates for Trans Equality — have slammed the bill as extreme and said it could wrongly criminalize doctors and implicate parents who support their transgender children.
McBride said Greene’s bill “would put parents and providers at risk of being jailed — literally jailed — for affirming their transgender child and following medical best practices.”
The second bill House Republicans are slated to consider Thursday, introduced by Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, and co-sponsored by Greene, would ban Medicaid from funding gender-affirming care for minors. Three states already have such bans in place, according to the Movement Advancement Project.
McBride charged that Republicans “are trying to use transgender people as political pawns in this moment.”
“They are trying to politicize a misunderstood community and misunderstood care,” she said. “No one’s health care should be politicized.”
She also opened up about her own childhood struggles as a young person.
“One of the things that gets so lost in this conversation is that the transgender adults of today were kids once. I was a kid once,” she said.
“I didn’t have the courage to come out until I was 21,” McBride continued, “and that means 21 years of pain, 21 years of unwavering homesickness that only went away when I was able to get the care that I needed. And my biggest regret in life is that I never had a childhood without that pain.”
In a documentary about McBride’s historic election to Congress that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year, the congresswoman discussed her reticence to make issues affecting trans people her central focus in Congress.
“It is an unbelievable challenge to figure out how I am seen as a full human being rather than just as a walking trans flag,” she said in the film, “State of Firsts.”
Nonetheless, several of McBride’s Republican colleagues began attacking her before she was sworn in in January. In November of last year Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., introduced a resolution to bar McBride from using the women’s bathrooms in the Capitol, and Greene said she was prepared to physically fight McBride if she saw her in the women’s restroom. Several have also repeatedly misgendered her publicly, including Rep. Keith Self , R-Texas, during a congressional hearing in March.
In “State of Firsts,” McBride spoke about her strategy for handling her Republican colleagues’ hostility, which attracted criticism from some who said they wanted to see her speak out more for the trans community.
“A win for them is me fighting back and then turning me into a caricature,” she said. “There would be a bounty on my head if I said I refused to comply [with the bathroom ban]. I refuse to be martyred. I want to be a member of Congress.”
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW.