In November 2024 C.E., Sarah McBride won Delaware’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first openly transgender person elected to the U.S. Congress. She took 57.6% of the vote against Republican John Whalen III, crossing a threshold that had stood for the entirety of American legislative history.
At a glance
- Trans representation in Congress: McBride’s win makes her the first out transgender person to serve in either chamber of the U.S. Congress, after 235 years without one.
- Election margin: She defeated her Republican opponent by nearly 15 percentage points, a decisive result in a competitive mid-Atlantic state.
- Political record: Before Congress, McBride served in Delaware’s state senate — the first trans person elected to any state senate in the U.S. — and won re-election in 2022 C.E., the first trans incumbent to do so.
A career built on firsts
McBride was 34 at the time of her election. She had already accumulated a list of historic achievements that most advocates spend a lifetime working toward.
After interning in the Obama-Biden White House and working for the Human Rights Campaign, she became the first trans person to address the Democratic National Convention in 2016 C.E. Her 2020 C.E. state senate victory in Delaware was another barrier broken. Her 2022 C.E. re-election proved the first win wasn’t a fluke.
Each of those milestones built toward the 2024 C.E. House race — and each helped normalize the idea of trans people in public office for voters who had never seen it before.
Why the seat matters beyond symbolism
Representation in elected office does something that media coverage and advocacy campaigns cannot fully replicate: it puts a person in the room where decisions are made.
Research on political representation consistently shows that legislators with lived experience of a policy area ask different questions, catch different blind spots, and push back in ways their colleagues do not. Trans rights legislation — governing healthcare access, identity documents, school policies, and anti-discrimination protections — touches every part of daily life for trans Americans. Having someone with direct experience of those stakes changes the quality of the debate.
The effect has already been visible at the state level. In Minnesota, state Rep. Leigh Finke sponsored the bill that Gov. Tim Walz signed in 2023 C.E., making Minnesota a trans refuge state. In Virginia, Delegate Danica Roem passed a bill ending anti-trans discrimination in health insurance. In Montana, state Rep. Zooey Zephyr’s forceful floor speech on gender-affirming care drew national attention to Republican efforts to restrict trans rights — coverage that may not have happened without a trans voice in the chamber.
McBride herself has spoken plainly about why presence matters. “If you’re not at the table,” she has said, “then you are on the menu.” She has also pointed to what she calls “the power of proximity” — the idea that personal relationships with a member of a demonized group tend to erode the abstractions that make discrimination easier to sustain.
A platform broader than identity
McBride did not run primarily on LGBTQ+ issues. Her platform centered on healthcare costs, reproductive freedom, workers’ rights, and criminal justice reform — the issues her Delaware constituents named as priorities.
That choice was deliberate. She has a record of reaching across the aisle, including on paid family leave legislation in Delaware that passed with bipartisan support. A platform grounded in broadly popular issues makes it harder for opponents to dismiss her as a single-issue candidate, and it gives her more room to build working relationships in a divided House.
She is also realistic about the limits of her position. She has acknowledged that hardline members of the Republican caucus are unlikely to work with her — but, as she has noted, they struggle to work with any Democrat or even many of their own colleagues.
An honest picture of the road ahead
One House seat does not resolve the legal pressures facing trans Americans, many of which have intensified at both the state and federal level in recent years. Anti-trans legislation has accelerated across dozens of states, and a single legislator — however historic — cannot reverse that alone.
What McBride’s election does is establish a precedent. The U.S. Congress now has an openly trans member. That fact cannot be undone, and it makes the next election slightly less improbable for the next candidate. Roughly 1.6 million adults in the U.S. identify as transgender, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA Law. They have never had a representative in Congress before November 2024 C.E.
Progress in representation rarely moves in a straight line. The Movement Advancement Project tracks LGBTQ+ policy across all 50 states and shows a patchwork of gains and losses that has shifted dramatically over the past decade. McBride enters Congress at a moment when that map is under pressure from multiple directions.
But she arrives with preparation, a record, and a clear-eyed sense of what she’s walking into. For the trans community and for anyone who believes democratic institutions work better when they reflect the full range of the people they serve, that matters. Her official congressional profile is now part of the permanent record of American governance — a fact that will outlast any single term or any single political moment.
The LGBTQ+ Legislators database now counts a trans person among members of the U.S. House. That took 235 years. The next milestone may not take as long.
Read more
For more on this story, see: LGBTQ Nation
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
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- The Good News for Humankind archive on the United States
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