"A Person With Parents": How Sarah McBride and her family stay strong in the face of transphobiahttps://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/11/a-person-with-parents-how-sarah-mcbride-and-her-family-stay-strong-in-the-face-of-transphobia/ 🔗Molly Sprayregen (3 Nov 2025)
Representative Sarah McBride (D-DE) often wonders if her Republican colleagues forget that she has parents.
Would her fellow elected officials still ferociously and publicly demean her if they remembered that the two people who love her more than anything in the world had to hear the insults, too?
It's easier for them to dehumanize her than to confront the real person behind the political pawn they have reduced her to, she told LGBTQ Nation. It's why she thinks the same legislators who misgender her and call her slurs on the House floor avoid eye contact when they cross paths with her in Capitol hallways.
Engaging with her, she explained, "would remind them that not only am I a person, but by extension, I am a person with parents, who hurt when they see and when they read what some of my colleagues are saying and doing to me."
"I don't think I anticipated entering Congress not only in a Republican trifecta with Donald Trump as president, but after an election where hundreds of millions of dollars would have been specifically spent on trans issues, and every conceivable issue in some way by the Republicans would seem to be brought back to trans issues."
It used to be easier to protect her mom and dad from the transphobia she has long endured as a prominent figure in Delaware politics, but now that the GOP regularly turns its hatred of her into front-page news, hiding it is no longer possible
"It's been hard for me to watch my parents have to grapple with that hate," she said, "for it to essentially go from zero to one hundred since I had shielded them from so much of it before."
