Sarah McBride is playing the long game.
At 8 or 9 years old, she became enthralled with the lectern her father used to teach classes at their family church, so her mother bought one. McBride set it up with an American flag backdrop and a hand-drawn cardboard presidential seal so she could recite President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 inaugural address.
Her father recounts this story roughly five minutes into “State of Firsts,” the documentary about McBride’s congressional campaign directed by Chase Joynt, which debuts in select theaters Friday. The Delaware congresswoman has said she’s not interested in being president, but it’s undeniable that she’s been preparing to enter politics for most of her life.
“Between serving Delaware and watching ‘The Traitors,’ there just isn’t enough time left in the day,” McBride’s spokesperson told The 19th in response to a question about whether she ever plans to run for president.
In “State of Firsts,” McBride — the first transgender member of Congress — navigates her ascension into national politics at a time when transphobia has become a major currency for Republicans. She grapples with her historic win coinciding with President Donald Trump’s return to power. She navigates personal attacks on Capitol Hill and intense media scrutiny, all while celebrating a country whose current politics refuse to respect her identity.
In one scene, McBride walks in a Fourth of July parade in Delaware, shaking hands and wishing people a Happy Fourth. In another, she makes friendly conversation with a man at a Wawa gas station. These mundane moments stand in stark contrast to the anti-trans rhetoric targeting her.
McBride moves through these moments of vitriol with determined poise. She’s quick to remind people that she’s not an activist, she’s a congresswoman from Delaware. She wants to be seen as a whole person, not just “a walking trans flag,” as she puts it. Tension around her identity doesn’t just come from Republicans; it also comes from transgender people who expect her to speak for them at a time when their rights are under attack. But she sees limits to what she can do or say without losing her job.
“It’s not just that they don’t want me in bathrooms, they don’t want me in Congress,” she says at one point in the documentary, reflecting on the Republican-led effort to ban her from women’s restrooms on Capitol Hill. “There would be a bounty on my head if I said that I would not comply. I refuse to be martyred. I want to be a member of Congress.”
In the fall before McBride took office, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that transgender women would be barred from women’s restrooms in the Capitol and House buildings — following an expletive-laden campaign led by South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, who has frequently used derogatory slurs to refer to McBride.
McBride, with her trademark tongue-in-cheek humor, has referred to Mace as Congress’ “top bathroom sheriff.” At Equality PAC’s National Pride Gala in Washington, D.C. this week, she wished Mace a “Happy Pride” after learning that her colleague is in a “respectful fifth place” in her gubernatorial race.
McBride says in the documentary that she felt traumatized by the amount of national scrutiny surrounding the bathroom ban. The story was all over major newspapers and cable news shows, and reporters roaming the halls of Congress would ask her which bathroom she planned to use. Meanwhile, as a freshman lawmaker, she was still getting lost in the building and trying to do her job.
Throughout her first term, McBride signaled that conservatives’ fixation on trans people was not going to dictate her agenda. She has worked with Republicans on bipartisan legislation to lower income barriers to invest in private markets, to improve family and medical leave, and to protect consumers from credit scams. Her first speech on the House floor hit back against the Trump administration for widespread cuts to social service programs — which is core to the issues that she ran on.
But as she looks to the future, she sees the rise of transphobia as tied to the rise of political extremism in the United States.
“We are not in this moment because the trans community did not fight hard enough,” she says as the documentary winds down. What this moment looks like to her is one of perseverance in the face of visceral, and oftentimes personal, hatred.
“Desperation fosters scapegoating and fearmongering. Those are the things that dictatorships are made of. There are a lot of horrific things happening and the stakes could not be higher. And I’m also seeing the seeds of progress.
“It’s hard to play the long game when your short-term life is at risk,” she says in the closing line of the film, while sitting in her office on Capitol Hill. “But we can’t give up on those possibilities. We have to be able to do both.”