Battle over transgender bathrooms reaches US Congress

Sarah McBride has yet to be sworn in as Delaware’s newest House member. The Democrat is still learning how to introduce legislation and navigate the vast network of buildings that make up Congress, like the rest of the freshmen elected in the November 5 election, who are in Washington for an orientation. She may not even know where the Capitol’s bathrooms are located, but her Republican colleagues already want to ban her from the ladies’ room. Because McBride is no ordinary congresswoman: She’s the first openly transgender person elected to the U.S. legislative branch at a time when the GOP is on a crusade to roll back LGBTQI+ rights.

On Monday, knowing McBride was in Washington, South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace introduced a resolution that would change House rules to ban transgender women — whether lawmakers or staffers — from using women’s restrooms in the Capitol. Though the resolution does not specifically name McBride, Mace made her intent clear in remarks to reporters after introducing the measure: “Yes, absolutely,” she said when asked if it was directed at the new representative from Delaware.

“I’m absolutely 100% gonna stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women’s restroom,” the Republican added, referring to McBride. And she didn’t stop there. Since Monday, Mace has shared a series of posts on X defending her position and attacking the new legislator: “McBride, a biological male, does not get a say in women’s private spaces”; “Letting biological men in our spaces is not only an invasion of privacy. It puts our safety at risk too”; and “This legislation is common sense for women’s safety.” She also posted a video in which she is seen placing a sign on the door of a women’s bathroom that says “biological”: “I never thought we would need a sign for this, but women’s restrooms are for BIOLOGICAL women. Not men.” For all of this, she says, she has received death threats.

For now, the resolution’s future is uncertain. Mace has said that House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican and ultraconservative, has committed to including it in the House rules package for the next Congress, which begins in January. Johnson, for his part, appeared to support the measure. “All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings — such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms — are reserved for individuals of that biological sex. Women deserve women’s only spaces,” he said on Wednesday.

Prior to this statement, however, the Louisiana Republican’s position was unclear. During a press conference on Tuesday, the speaker declined to answer whether McBride is a man or a woman: “I’m not going to engage in silly debates about this. There’s a concern about the uses of restroom facilities and locker rooms and all that. This is an issue that Congress has never had to address before. We’re going to do that in a deliberate fashion with members’ consensus on it, and we will accommodate the needs of every single person,” he said.

Hours later, however, Johnson called another press conference, which ended up adding fuel to the controversy. “For anyone who doesn’t know my established record on this issue, let me be unequivocally clear: a man is a man, and a woman is a woman, and a man cannot become a woman,” he said. “That said, I also believe that’s what scripture teaches, what I just said, but I also believe we treat everybody with dignity. We can do and believe all those things at the same time,” he added, without taking a position for or against the measure.

Even if the resolution were to pass, it would be difficult to enforce. This week, some Democrats have asked whether Mace intends to require pat-downs or blood tests at the doors of all Capitol bathrooms. Mace, for her part, has not specified how the rule would be enforced.

McBride at the center of a larger culture war

As expected, the controversial resolution has sparked outrage among Democratic lawmakers, including party leaders in both chambers of Congress: from the Senate, Chuck Schumer called it “cruel” and, from the House, Hakeem Jeffries described it as “bullying.”

McBride, who will be sworn in on January 3, downplayed the issue and called the measure a “distraction.” “This is a blatant attempt from far-right extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing. We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars,” she wrote on social media.

McBride’s response to this latest attack against her echoes the way she has approached her campaign, during which she barely discussed her identity. Before her election win, she maintained that she was focused on “delivering tangible results for the constituents” she serves, not explaining her identity to anyone. She said that as a state senator in her native Delaware — where she was also the first trans person elected to the state legislature — she was accustomed to working with people who have voted against LGBTQI+ rights and was willing to continue to do so in Washington to advance her political agenda, which focuses on lowering preschool costs and raising the minimum wage, among other measures.

But McBride already knew that her arrival in Washington would provoke outrage among legislators from the most radical and conservative wing of the Republican Party, which in recent years has been dedicated to trying to dismantle all kinds of protections for trans people, especially in the areas of health and education. In addition to trying to force them to use the bathrooms that correspond to their biological sex, as they intend to do with McBride, Republicans have concentrated their efforts on prohibiting medical care for trans minors who want to affirm their gender and excluding trans women from women’s sports leagues.

And they have attempted to do so with a raft of proposed measures at both the federal and state levels. This year alone, a total of 81 anti-trans bills have been introduced in Congress, according to a website dedicated to tracking such legislation. And across the country, more than 500 state laws have been proposed. Of those, 45 have been passed, in 16 states.

Those efforts are expected — and Rep. Mace’s bill demonstrates this — to accelerate when the new Congress, with Republican majorities in both chambers, is sworn in next year with Donald Trump as president. The president-elect also has a long history of attacking trans people: in the final weeks of his campaign, he spent more on campaigns focused on attacking this community than on any other issue. In total, the Republican spent nearly $215 million on anti-trans rights ads. And with McBride in Congress, it’s clear that the GOP will have a new target to attack whenever and however it pleases.

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