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.
