U.S. Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) deliberately and repeatedly used the honorific “Mr.” for U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), the first and only transgender member of Congress, sparking a confrontation that derailed a House subcommittee hearing on Tuesday.

After Self, who leads the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Europe Subcommittee, misgendered the congresswoman from Delaware, she replied “Thank you, Madam Chair.”

The top Democrat in the room, Massachusetts Congressman Bill Keating, then spoke up to request that the chair repeat his introduction, which he did, again referring to McBride as “Mr.”

“You are out of order. Mr. Chairman,” Keating said, raising his voice. “Have you no decency? I mean, I have come to know you a little bit, but this is not decent.”

Self then started to adjourn the hearing, telling colleagues “we will continue this” before he was interrupted by the ranking member, who told him, “You will not continue it with me unless you introduce a duly elected representative the right way.”

McBride addressed the matter in a post on X Tuesday night, writing, “No matter how I’m treated by some colleagues, nothing diminishes my awe and gratitude at getting to represent Delaware in Congress. It is truly the honor and privilege of a lifetime. I simply want to serve and to try to make this world a better place.”

No matter how I'm treated by some colleagues, nothing diminishes my awe and gratitude at getting to represent Delaware in Congress. It is truly the honor and privilege of a lifetime. I simply want to serve and to try to make this world a better place.

— Sarah McBride (@SarahEMcBride) March 12, 2025

Self doubled down again, writing on social media “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” citing President Donald Trump’s day-one executive order mandating that the federal government treat gender as a binary that cannot and does not deviate from one’s birth sex.

The policy is out of step with mainstream science and medicine, which recognizes that human biology is complex and one’s gender identity is often but not always linked to one’s sex at birth. Critics of the order have also noted that its narrow definitions for sex and gender exclude people who are born intersex, with a combination of male and female biological traits (genitals, chromosomes, hormones.)

“While there are some areas of active debate, scientists are in wide agreement that biological sex in humans as well as the rest of life on earth is much more complicated than a simple binary,” a biology professor said in a report published by the Washington Post last month.

“It’s trying to explain away people,” a health law professor told the paper, referring to the executive order. The administration, he added, wants “to try to present it as this extremely simple issue — as if it’s really just one or the other, you’re male or you’re female.”

McBride’s historic election last year came as Trump and other Republicans were running on promises to enact increasingly extreme anti-trans legislation or policies, with GOP campaigns, spending $21.5 million on anti-trans ads, with much of that spend coming at the tail end o the 2024 cycle.

Transphobic attacks against the congresswoman, including from House Republicans, began before she was even seated. U.S. Reps. Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia both misgendered her repeatedly while touting Mace’s proposal to prohibit trans women from using sex-segregated women’s bathrooms at the Capitol, publicly acknowledging that the move was intended to target McBride. More recently, U.S. Rep. Mary Miller of West Virginia misgendered her in February on the House floor.

When serving in the Delaware Senate, McBride was recognized for her successful sponsorship of a bill providing 12-week paid family and medical leave for workers, an issue that was central to her congressional campaign along with her focus on healthcare reform and is a key piece of her focus on reforming care infrastructure in Congress.

In cases where she has elected to address the cruel and bigoted attacks against her from GOP colleagues and others, McBride, has consistently tried to redirect attention towards her work on behalf of the constituents she serves, as seen in her post on Tuesday.

In January, McBride partnered with U.S. Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.) on the first bill she introduced in Washington, which aims to protect consumers from scams in the credit repair industry.

Last week, the congresswoman joined her colleagues in reintroducing the bipartisan Protecting the Right to Organize Act, and together with other Democrats introduced the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act which, per a press release, would “restore and modernize the protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and prevent states with a history of voter discrimination from erecting new barriers to the ballot box.”

For several election cycles, Democrats have been gunning for California’s 40th Congressional District, a purplish area encompassing inland Orange County and neighboring San Bernardino and Riverside Counties that could help deliver the party control of the House if Republican U.S. Rep. Young Kim is ousted.

Privacy lawyer and former Chino Valley school board member Christina Gagnier spoke with the Washington Blade recently about her campaign for the seat, which draws from years of experience “standing up to bullies” throughout her life and career.

In 2021, she lost her school board seat by voting to defend the LGBTQ community against attacks by groups like Moms for Liberty and the Proud Boys, as well as a policy of forced outing in the district.

At the same time, “despite all the culture war-laden headlines, we created dual immersion programs. We worked on STEM education. We opened new schools. We opened a bioscience academy. We did all these wonderful things that unfortunately didn’t make the headlines, but [it was] the things that parents care about.”

Likewise, she told the Blade, “the issues in this campaign are kitchen table issues. Through Our Schools, USA,” a group that she founded to advance public education, “I’m talking to public school parents every day, and they are worried about being able to buy groceries.”

Gagnier continued, “I just spoke with a mom who took out a loan to buy groceries and supplies for a month because of how they’re getting hit. I’ve talked to business owners who have just lost government contracts and might be going into debt because the government just cut off the contract.”

Here is where the rubber meets the road in terms of how the new administration’s work in Washington is harming the lives of everyday people, she said.

“People are realizing that while Young Kim masquerades as a moderate, she’s voting 100% in lockstep with Mike Johnson’s MAGA majority,” Gagnier said, referring to the Republican House speaker.

“We see families in this district suffering, and they’re contacting their representative, and she’s not doing anything,” she said, adding that constituents are likely to continue suffering as “Donald Trump is cutting funding and doing things that are impacting their day-to-day lives.”

The president and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill are bullying people, Gagnier stressed. About 82,000 people in CA-40 will be harmed by proposed cuts to Medicaid, she said. “The issues in this campaign are kitchen table issues.”

Represented by Republican U.S. Rep. Young Kim since 2021, the district is home to small businesses that provide its “lifeblood,” she said, and the owners of these enterprises are “already feeling the impacts” of “the tariffs” as well as “the cuts coming out of D.C.”

“I speak to veterans who are also business owners, and you know, they’re losing opportunities and support left and right,” Gagnier added.

Additionally, she said, “the other thing that is getting attacked is choice: Families being able to make their own private medical decisions, women being able to have the rights that they should have.”

“I’m putting in the work to make sure that we have the resources and the message and we’re reaching voters so that we can actually flip the seat,” Gagnier said. “So, you know, I think this is absolutely doable.”

CA-40 is the GOP-held seat in California that Donald Trump won by the smallest margin in 2024, and last year Kim defended her seat with 1.5 points less than the margin she won in 2022, despite the rest of the country moving toward the right during that time period.

Looking ahead to the Democratic primary election, “There’s a couple other candidates that have thrown their hat in the ring, but, you know, I’m 100% laser-focused on my campaign, making sure that I’m communicating with our families, our business owners, our veterans, and our seniors, and that I’m doing the work I need to do,” Gagnier said.

Trump is “destroying the Department of Education,” Gagnier said, and he selected a nominee to lead the agency, Linda McMahon, who represents “chaos and destruction.”

The newly confirmed secretary was picked not to “reform the Department of Education,” not to “fix things that might be issues at the Department of Education,” but rather is “coming in to destroy” the agency.

Gagnier said “Trump and Musk are already inside of the Department of Education, gutting it, and the end result of that is already being felt by public school families.” For example, she said, “We work with a lot of special education parents. I have parents that are frightened that their children are no longer going to be able to go to public school because they won’t have resources. That’s not okay.”

“We have teachers that are getting fired already because the grants and programs that come from Department of Education are being taken away,” she continued. “We have really talented educators who love kids, who love helping kids, getting unemployed.”

Returning to her election, Gagnier stressed “this is why this race is so important. We have to flip the house. We have to get in there and make sure that these cuts are stopped and we restore all these valuable funding sources that are impacting families.”

“In flipping the house, what that means is we’re able to restore these programs,” she said. “We’re able to make sure that these protections and funding that’s in place to support America’s families, that they’re reinstituted.”

“Donald Trump is a bully. Donald Trump is not going to stop being a bully. He’s going to keep going in and cutting things that America’s families, that the families of CA-40, rely on,” Gagnier said.

Asked what the Democratic Party writ large should do following last year’s electoral defeat, she said “we need a reset on generally as a party is the way we communicate with everyday people,” which will involve being “better listeners” rather than doing “one-way communication.”

“We need to start listening to voters, not tweeting at them,” Gagnier explained. “We need to make it clear to voters that we respect them, and that’s what I’m doing. I respect them, no matter who they voted for [as] president, I respect them. I’m listening to them. I’m here to advocate for them.”

This focus deviates from the tactics used by her Republican opponent who, Gagnier said, “can’t even take simple votes like supporting same-sex marriage” and whose voting record is no different from U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.).

“Young Kim has taken an oppositional stance to protecting basic rights, like whether it’s for the LGBTQIA+ community or a woman’s right to choice and to make their own healthcare decisions, she literally has taken an oppositional stance to protecting basic rights,” she added. “We’re going to communicate that, but I think that people need to be aware that her voting record is no different than the rest of the MAGA majority.”

Standing up to bullies

“What keeps parents up at night, families up at night, are prices at the grocery store, not culture wars,” Gagnier said. “And so I’m going to do my part in this campaign to gear my messaging back toward those kitchen table issues.”

By contrast, Republicans like Kim have prioritized trans issues that most parents and constituents in CA-40 do not really care about, she said. “They’re worried about their kids having access to college and career opportunities. When they’re going home at night after working all day, commuting, pick up and drop off, [trans issues] are not the issues that they’re concerned about.”

“I lost a school board seat,” Gagnier said. “And I would do it again and again and again, because I’m going to stand up to bullies, and I was not going to allow those students to be bullied in the school district I represented.”

Nor do other parents approve of kids being bullied in schools, neither theirs nor anyone else’s, she said. “They don’t like kids getting singled out. They don’t like schools being less safe.”

Gagnier added, “we see a lot of noise out there but parents love their public schools, and I think that we need to focus on school safety. And part of this is school safety. If kids at school don’t feel safe going to school, don’t feel safe while they’re at school, and they’re being targeted, that makes the school unsafe for every other kid, too.”

The bioscience academy she helped to spearhead as a school board member is a “four-year program for high school students” that — “in addition to the regular things high school kids have in the classroom” — affords them the opportunity to explore “careers in bioscience, biotechnology, the medical field, engineering.”

Gagnier continued, “So it just really gives these kids this very career-technical education focused exposure to these fields. And I’m very proud that we launched that program while I was on the school board, and families love the program, and so I’m just so blessed that we were able to provide that for the students and their families.”

U.S. Capitol Police on Wednesday arrested 11 HIV/AIDS activists who protested outside a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting between lawmakers and Pete Marocco, deputy administrator-designate at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The protesters held posters that read “Marocco lies people with AIDS die,” “Marocco’s homophobia transphobia kills,” and “Marocco’s ‘waiver’ is a deadly lie” as they stood in front of the door of the room in the Rayburn House Office Building in which the meeting took place.

“Marocco has blood on his hands,” they chanted.

The Trump-Vance administration in January froze nearly all U.S. foreign aid spending for at least 90 days. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later issued a waiver that allows PEPFAR and other “life-saving humanitarian assistance” programs to continue to operate during the freeze.

The Washington Blade has reported PEPFAR-funded programs in Kenya and other African countries have suspended services and even shut down because of a lack of U.S. funding. The Trump-Vance administration’s efforts to dismantle USAID, along with the suspension of nearly all U.S. foreign aid, has been “a catastrophe” for the global LGBTQ rights movement.

“USAID’s failure to implement lifesaving humanitarian assistance under the waiver is the result of political leadership at USAID, the Department of State, and DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), who have created and continue to create intentional and/or unintentional obstacles that have wholly prevented implementation,” wrote Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for USAID Global Health, in a Feb. 28 memo. “These actions include the refusal to pay for assistance activities conducted or goods and services rendered, the blockage and restriction of access to USAID’s payment systems followed by the creation of new and ineffective processes for payments, the ever-changing guidance as to what qualifies as ‘lifesaving’ and whose approval is needed in making that decision, and most recently, the sweeping terminations of the most critical implementing mechanisms necessary for providing lifesaving services.”

“These actions individually and in combination have resulted in the U.S. government’s failure to implement critical lifesaving activities,” he added. “This will no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale. This memo serves to document the LHA (lifesaving humanitarian assistance) waiver process and challenges encountered by the Bureau for Global Health to date, excluding PEPFAR.”

Enrich in a second memo he wrote on Tuesday said the “temporary pause on foreign aid and delays in approving lifesaving  humanitarian assistance (LHA) for global health will lead to increased death and disability,  accelerate global disease spread, contribute to destabilizing fragile regions, and heightened security risks—directly endangering American national security, economic stability, and public  health.”

CBS News on Monday reported Enrich has been placed on administrative leave.

A Capitol Police spokesperson told the Blade the protesters who officers arrested on Wednesday have been charged with “crowding, obstructing, or incommoding.”

Capitol Police on Feb. 26 arrested 21 HIV/AIDS activists who protested the funding freeze in the Cannon House Office Building. Officers on Feb. 13 took into custody five HIV/AIDS activists who disrupted a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing that focused on USAID.

Michael Key contributed to this story.