Sarah McBride opens up about her darkest day in Congress (exclusive)

"The first time The Advocate sat down together for an interview with McBride after she won her historic election was November 15, 2024, inside a designated media broadcast room in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. It was orientation week for new members of Congress, and Sarah McBride, then 34, Delaware's newly elected congresswoman, was radiating something between fatigue and disbelief. "I'm just trying to breathe it all in," she said at the time. A few days later, the joy turned."

""The high of orientation," McBride explained when The Advocate met her again almost a year later, in late October, this time in her Longworth Building office, "was met with probably the deepest low of my life outside of losing my husband to cancer." She paused before naming it. "Calling it a 'bathroom controversy' feels cheap. It was so much more than that.""

"Nearly one year after making history as the first out transgender member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Delaware Democrat Sarah McBride has spent her first term navigating both the exhilaration of progress and the exhaustion of being a symbol in a Congress with a Republican majority that is often hostile to her existence. In an exclusive interview with The Advocate in her Capitol Hill office, McBride reflected on the moment she called her darkest day,"

Sarah McBride became the first openly transgender member of the U.S. House and spent her first term balancing exhilaration and exhaustion as a visible symbol in a Republican-majority Congress often hostile to her existence. Orientation week on November 15, 2024, brought excitement that shifted days later when House Speaker Mike Johnson implemented a November 20 ban barring transgender people from using restrooms aligned with their gender identity in House-controlled spaces. McBride said she would comply with House rules. She faced a wave of transphobia yet recorded quieter victories across her first ten months and reflected on personal losses including her husband's death from cancer.

Read at Advocate.com