Congress has been in session fewer than 30 days but already its first out transgender member has attracted more animus and admirers than a typical freshman in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In her first one-on-one interview with an out trans journalist, U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) told the Washington Blade on Feb. 12 she seeks to emulate the example of another trailblazer who came face to face with hate and oppression as he broke barriers: Baseball icon Jackie Robinson. But she started with a caveat.

“I, in no way would compare what I’m going through with what he went through, what our community is going through, with what people of color have gone through in this country,” McBride said before making her point. “I think that Jackie Robinson, like so many trailblazers throughout history, understood the microscope that a ‘first’ is under, understood that strength is often in being dignified and graceful under attack.”

McBride, 34, was born two decades after Robinson died. She, like many of her generation, came to know the story of the first Black player in Major League Baseball from the 2013 film, “42,” starring the late Chadwick Boseman and Harrison Ford.

“And in that movie, one thing that is said to Jackie Robinson as he prepared to become the player with the Brooklyn Dodgers is that if you respond to a slur, they’ll only hear your slur. If you meet a punch with a punch, they’ll say you’re the aggressor. And I think that is true in a lot of circumstances, and it has informed the way I and others have conducted ourselves, I think, in the position of being a ‘first.’”

McBride spoke to the Blade following an event at Politics and Prose at the Wharf in D.C., to celebrate “Cleavage,” the new memoir by bestselling author Jennifer Finney Boylan. McBride served as Boylan’s interviewer, posing questions about the book, just as Boylan did for McBride when she promoted her first memoir in 2018, “Tomorrow Will Be Different.”

Both Boylan and activist Mara Keisling are models for the congresswoman, she said, in “the compassion and care and thoughtfulness and the calmness” that they exude in their approach to the work they do. McBride said she knew throughout her campaign and in now serving her constituents in Delaware that she would come under attack from the right, and that trans people in particular would feel just as wounded by those attacks.

“They’re going to throw things at me and my job will be not to give them a response they seek,” she told the Blade. “They will misgender me and my job will be not to respond in the way that they hope I will respond. And people seem to understand that in the abstract. I think it’s harder in the reality when you’re seeing it, because when you are a ‘first,’ people viscerally feel your highs, but they also viscerally feel the lows. And I think it’s understandable that when people see behavior toward me in Congress, they feel it themselves.”

“And so it hurts. And I get that. And I am sorry that that there is that effect.”

“But it doesn’t change the need for me to, I believe, not give them the response they need, they want, not incentivize that behavior by giving them that response,” said McBride. “And to give an alternative view of who trans people are to the public, because we have been caricatured by the right as self-obsessed, as hysterical, as the ‘pronoun police.’ And I think it is important for us to have a broader diversity of messages, messengers, and images of who trans people are.”

McBride was asked who inspired her to choose Jackie Robinson as a role model, instead of someone like Rosa Parks, the Black woman arrested in Alabama for refusing to give up her seat on a crowded bus to a white person. She cited the support of her parents, acknowledging that not every trans person is so fortunate.

“My journey coming out to my parents and walking with them to not only coming out publicly, but just this entire journey, I have seen the power of grace in opening hearts and changing minds and moving people,” she said. “My parents were wonderful from the start. I was very lucky from the start, but there is no question that they’ve experienced growth during the course of the last decade to 12 years since coming out.”

“And I think part of that has been because I’ve been willing to walk with them at their pace,” said McBride. “Sometimes I’m pulling them a little bit, but I’m always holding their hand. I’m always within arm’s distance.”

McBride is a widow, a life-changing experience that followed by four days the joy of being a newlywed. Her husband, Andrew Cray, a trans man, succumbed to oral cancer on Aug. 28, 2014. A decade later, she said Andy is never far from her thoughts.

“I think about it every day,” said McBride. “You know, he was both principled and pragmatic in the way he sought to create change. And I have always sought to emulate that and reflect that approach … Andy was my sherpa into change-making.”

A change in her own self-confidence followed her election to Congress, she said. As she struggled, she considered, “What would Andy do?”

“This has been the first time where I’ve wondered, I’ve questioned whether I’m hitting the right note, and what he would think. I think he would agree. I think he would approve. But I’ve struggled with it.”

But amid the struggle, McBride still finds joy.

She recounted a recent experience with a man she described as one of her late husband’s best friends, an advocate working to expand access to healthcare for the LGBTQ community.

McBride said he paid her a visit in her office on Capitol Hill, wearing a tie that had belonged to Andy. He provided validation that, she said, “Andy would have completely approved of what I have done and what I am doing.”

“What was amazing in that moment, as I was getting that validation from my friend and Andy’s best friend, was I thought I had lost my wedding ring. And it’s a miracle that I had been able to keep it for a decade,” she recalled. “I just came to the conclusion that I would never get it back and that it was lost for good. We’re having this conversation—and I talk with my hands—and I hit my purse and it falls over and the wedding ring falls right out. So, it’s this beautiful, beautiful moment.”

(VIDEO BY DAWN ENNIS)