This Delaware Legislator Might Soon Become the First Openly Trans Member of the U.S. House

In 2020, Sarah McBride made history as the first openly transgender state senator in the country, and now she’s ready to blast through another barrier. McBride has announced her campaign for Delaware’s U.S. House seat, and if she wins in 2024, that would make her the country’s first-ever transgender member of Congress.

McBride is running to replace Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, who has decided to run for U.S. Senate. She still has to make it through a primary, but her popularity and resume have already made her a favorite. If she pulls it off, it would be a huge win for LGBTQ representation at a critical time when their rights are under attack.

Who is Sarah McBride?

If McBride’s name sounds familiar, that’s probably because the 32-year-old has been a political badass making national news for years. She first made national headlines in 2012 when she came out as transgender while serving as student body president at American University. She worked in the Obama White House and on the campaign staffs of former Delaware Governor Jack Markell and Attorney General Beau Biden, the president’s son who died in 2015.

In 2016, she became the first openly transgender person to speak at the Democratic National Convention, where she talked about her hopes for the future: “I worried that my dreams and my identity were mutually exclusive,” she said. “Since then, I’ve seen change.” More recently, she was the national spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ advocacy organization in the country. She has used her platform to fight for protections for LGBTQ people, such as Delaware’s Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Act.

Although “first openly transgender person to …” prefaces just about every line on her resume, as a politician, McBride has also cast herself as a champion of workers and families. In Delaware, she helped pass paid family and medical leave and has supported reproductive rights, gun control, and worker protections. She talks about standing up for small businesses and unions and standing up to lobbyists. Basically, she’s a progressive Democrat who also happens to be transgender.

“My commitment is to the people in Delaware who aren’t seen, who don’t shout the loudest or fund political campaigns: parents busy raising their children, seniors worried about paying for prescription drugs, working people struggling to keep up,” McBride said in her campaign announcement video. “Everyone deserves a member of Congress who sees them and respects them.”

Could she actually win?

Hell, yeah, she could win!

First of all, Delaware leans heavily Democratic and hasn’t had a Republican representative in Congress for 20 years. So if her name is on the ballot in 2024, chances are she will be the one swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution the following January.

First she has to win the primary, though. Although she is the first Delaware Democrat to officially announce her candidacy for Delaware’s sole seat in the U.S. House, it is likely that others will jump into the pool. Even so, because of her success in state politics and her popularity, McBride is an early favorite to win the nomination.

She already has scored some key endorsements from labor groups, Democratic heavyweights, and Delaware politicians. Although fellow Delawarean President Joe Biden has not officially endorsed anyone, he did write the foreword in her 2018 memoir, Tomorrow Will Be Different, so you can figure he’s also a fan.

So will tomorrow be different?

If she succeeds, transgender people would finally have representation in national government, and McBride would have an even larger platform to promote inclusiveness and to fight discriminatory policies focused on gender and sexuality. Even more powerful would be the message sent by voters if a majority elect her to represent them, that acceptance is possible, that in spite of how loud they are yelling, the transphobic bigots are not winning. And honestly, it would not hurt Republican members of Congress to interact with a real-life transgender person to see that they are not the confused supervillains created by their imaginations.

(featured image: screengrab, McBride for Delaware)