Sarah McBride launches House bid, would be first openly trans member of Congress

Delaware Democrat Sarah McBride, who in 2020 became the nation’s first openly transgender state senator, is setting out to make history again — this time as the first out transgender person elected to Congress.

“My commitment is to the people in Delaware who aren’t seen,” McBride said Monday in a campaign video announcing her bid for Delaware’s sole House seat. “Everyone deserves a member of Congress who sees them and who respects them.”

Democratic Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, who has represented Delaware in the House since 2017, last week announced her run for a Delaware Senate seat left open by retiring Sen. Tom Carper (D), leaving the state’s only House seat open.

Although McBride, 32, is not the first openly transgender person to run for Congress — more than a dozen others have tried — she could be the first with a fighting chance. She’s been widely viewed as the front-runner in the race for Delaware’s at-large congressional district, which Rochester won last year with more than 55 percent of the vote.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the House race as “solid Democrat.”

In an interview Monday with The News Journal, McBride said she’s cognizant of the uniqueness of her candidacy, “but ultimately, I’m not running to be a trans member of Congress.”

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It’s a callback to her 2020 state Senate campaign, the outlet noted, during which McBride ran as a “senator who happens to be transgender.” She was elected that year with more than 70 percent of the general election vote and ran unopposed the following election.

McBride came out publicly as transgender at age 21, while entering her senior year at American University in Washington, where she studied political science. In an op-ed published in the university’s student newspaper titled “The Real Me,” McBride, then the university’s outgoing student body president, wrote that she had spent her “entire life” struggling with her gender identity.

“At an early age, I also developed my love of politics. I wrestled with the idea that my dream and my identity seemed mutually exclusive; I had to pick,” McBride wrote in the op-ed. “So I picked what I thought was easier and wouldn’t disappoint people.”

“I now know that my dreams and my identity are only mutually exclusive if I don’t try,” she wrote.

A native of Wilmington, Del., McBride previously served on the board of directors of Equality Delaware, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, and helped lead a successful effort to add gender identity and expression to the state’s nondiscrimination laws.

Before her election to the state legislature in 2020, McBride was a spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ civil rights group. She also worked at the Center for American Progress and interned at the White House, the first openly transgender woman to do so.

As a teenager, McBride worked on Delaware campaigns for former Democratic Gov. Jack Markell and the late state Attorney General Beau Biden (D), President Biden’s eldest son.

She published her memoir, “Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality,” in 2018, with a forward from President Biden.

McBride’s candidacy comes at a pivotal moment for transgender rights in the U.S. — close to 500 anti-LGBTQ bills have been filed this year in state legislatures nationwide, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, most of them targeting transgender young people.

In Congress, House Republicans this session passed legislation to prevent transgender women and girls from participating on female sports teams. Bills that would heavily restrict access to gender-affirming health care for transgender minors are also being considered.

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