Sarah McBride Isn’t A 'Fake Woman' But Nancy Mace Is A Fake Public Servant

Cruelty is easier than actual constituent services.

I met Sarah McBride sometime in 2018 in downtown Portland, Oregon. She was on her way to Powell’s for a book signing. I’d recognized her from her 2016 Democratic National Convention speech. We spoke for a few minutes. She was very nice, and I confirmed she was heading in the right direction to Powell’s. She invited me to the signing, but I had another meeting. I did pick up a copy of her memoir, Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality (with a foreword from Joe Biden).

There were many different and better tomorrows for McBride. In 2020, McBride successfully ran for the Delaware Senate. During her first term, she successfully sponsored the Healthy Delaware Families Act, which goes into effect in 2026 and will let families take a paid 12-week family or medical leave.

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Nancy Mace Jumps Jim Crow Over Kamala Harris’s Name

This year, McBride was elected to represent Delaware’s at-large congressional district in the House of Representatives. She’s replacing Lisa Blunt Rochester, who’s now the state’s new senator-elect. McBride defeated her primary opponents with 79.9 percent of the vote and outperformed other Democrats in the general election.

McBride is the first trans person to serve in the House, but she’s more interested in serving her constituents than making history.

“The party that was focused on culture wars and trans people was the Republican Party,” McBride said. “I didn’t run on identity, but my identity was not a secret.” (Watch below.)

Republican Rep. Nancy Mace wants to make McBride’s identity an issue. Worse, Mace wants to challenge McBride’s very humanity and dignity so she can headline a news cycle. We shouldn’t expect much from someone who willingly walked around with a goofy scarlet “A” on her chest, but this is an especially low point.

Mace introduced a bill this week that would ban trans women from using women’s restrooms at the Capitol. She doesn’t hide that the bill specifically targets McBride, who unlike Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert isn’t starting her freshman year in Congress by plotting a coup.

"Yes, and absolutely. And then some,” Mace told reporters who gave her the attention she craves. “I’m not going to stand for a man, you know, someone with a penis, in the women's locker room.”

I don’t think Mace has to stand for anyone in a women’s restroom. There are no urinals in there. Also, McBride’s official site details her policy positions and accomplishments but doesn’t offer specifics about her anatomy, which isn’t anyone’s business. Transphobic bigots have a very twisted idea of what goes on in a restroom. It’s been almost 30 years since the unisex restrooms on Ally McBeal.

The Unbearable Shame Of Being Nancy Mace

Mace, who openly supports actual sex offenders, including the president-elect, tries to wrap her bigotry in the guise of personal trauma.

“I’m a victim of abuse myself. I'm a rape survivor,” she said. “I have PTSD from the abuse I’ve suffered at the hands of a man, and I know how vulnerable women and girls are in private spaces, so I’m absolutely 100 percent going to stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women’s restroom, in our locker rooms, in our changing rooms. I will be there fighting you every step of the way.”

After January 6, Mace said she wanted to start carrying a gun in the Capitol, which I consider more of an active threat than McBride’s private parts. There is no evidence that trans women are a safety risk to other women. Greene is the one who’s threatened physical violence against her trans colleague if she spots her in the restroom.

This recalls the odious memory of North Carolina’s 2016 “bathroom bill,” which required people to use the bathroom that matched the sex on their birth certificate. In a bold protest of the law, McBride took a selfie of herself in a Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, women’s restroom.

“Here I am using a women’s restroom in North Carolina that I’m technically barred from being in,” she wrote on Instagram. “They say I’m a pervert. They say I’m a man dressed as a woman. They say I’m a threat to their children. They say I’m confused. They say I’m dangerous. And they say accepting me as the person I have fought my life to be seen as reflects the downfall of a once great nation. I’m just a person. We are all just people. Trying to pee in peace. Trying to live our lives as fully and authentically as possible. Barring me from this restroom doesn't help anyone. And allowing me to continue to use this bathroom — just without fear of discrimination and harassment — doesn't hurt anyone. Stop this. We are good people. #repealhb2”

Just as the NAACP had considered Rosa Parks an ideal “face” for the Montgomery bus boycott, McBride challenged the average person’s biases and fears about women like her. Yes, it mattered that she’s white and doesn’t look like the so-called “man in a dress” from right-wing scare campaigns. Respectability politics are frustrating but, like with Ms. Parks, they can advance the cause for everyone within a marginalized group.

The North Carolina bathroom bill backfired and Republican Gov. Pat McCrory lost re-election in a year that was otherwise bad for Democrats.

There’s a big difference between public and workplace restrooms. McBride isn’t a random person in the stall next to Mace. She’s a fellow member of Congress. If Republicans claim that Donald Trump’s re-election somehow morally expunges his criminal record, they must concede that Delaware voters chose McBride to represent them in the House. However, Mace refuses to even talk to the woman she’s persecuting: “Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say,” she said, like an asshole.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries responded to Mace’s grotesque bill with a fearsome barrage of rhetorical questions:

“This is the lesson you’ve drawn?” Jeffries asked at a press conference. “From the election in November? This is your priority? That you want to bully a member of congress? As opposed to welcoming her to join this body?”

Yes, that is exactly what Mace and the GOP are doing. We can abandon the Socratic method and move on to direct accusations. House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that McBride would be barred from women’s restrooms and defined as a “man” according to House rules.

McBride said in a statement, “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families. Like all members, I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them.”

“This effort to distract from the real issues facing this country hasn’t distracted me over the last several days, as I’ve remained hard at work preparing to represent the greatest state in the union come January,” she added.

Activists are already giving McBride a hard time for seemingly backing down, but it’s not clear what immediate options she had without full Democratic leadership’s support.

Perversely, Mace is the one playing the victim. She claims she’s received death threats and defiantly states she won’t be “bullied into submission.” Now, the bathroom bigot has filed a similar anti-trans bill that would apply to all federal property.

Megyn Kelly, another fully “biological” terrible woman, ranted on social media: “Why should Nancy Mace or any other female member of Congress/staff have to share their bathroom with a man pretending to be a woman. It’s NOT about the feelings of the man masquerading as a fake woman. It’s about not forcing actual woman to have to worry that a man is in their bathroom where they are vulnerable (and which is supposed to be a safe/private, female-only space).”

Lady, it’s a restroom not Themyscira, and the Amazons would welcome Sarah McBride as a fellow sister. Kelly and Mace aren’t secure in their own identities unless they’re ostracizing someone else. Mace is a South Carolina representative actively trying to segregate a restroom. “It is offensive that a man in a skirt thinks that he’s my equal,” she said like every segregationist before her.

Segregationists claimed that white women shouldn’t have to share their “safe/private” space with Black women because they might catch syphilis from shared toilet seats and towels. White women once protested integrated bathrooms with labor strikes and walkouts, while Black women were often harassed and intimidated. When Central High in Little Rock was integrated, white girls refused to use the same restroom that the “[n-word] girls use.”

Thurgood Marshall argued that segregation was state-sanctioned humiliation and dehumanization. “Separate but equal” was always a lie. Even if the separate accommodations were identical, the whole point was to make clear that one group is inferior to another and not fit to associate with them. Every argument against trans women in “women-only” spaces has a similarly discriminatory foundation.

It’s a shameful history, but fortunately for Mace, she is demonstrably incapable of shame. She talks about the sanctity of “female-only” spaces when she’s the first woman graduate of The Citadel, which was once a “male-only” space. The first woman accepted to The Citadel was Shannon Faulkner, after an extensive legal battle. I’ve met Shannon Faulkner (I’m like the Forrest Gump of this article). I was interning at The Greenville News when she won her suit against The Citadel. I clearly recall the joy on her face that Citadel men (cadets and administrators alike) would later do everything possible to stamp out. She washed out after a week, and during that time, she was actively tormented and mistreated. She later claimed that her parents’ lives were threatened to force her to drop out.

Not surprisingly, Mace has shown little regard for Faulkner, who made her own enrollment at The Citadel possible: “She doesn’t wear The Ring because she didn’t earn it,” Mace posted on Facebook in 2018. “… And in the hearts of most #Citadel graduates — she’s not alumni. There is no edification or achievement in her failure.”

Mace doesn’t appreciate that when a trailblazer tries and fails, they still make it possible for others to try and actually succeed. Keep that in mind when Mace suggests that her crusade against Sarah McBride is somehow about “women’s rights.” McBride and Faulkner are both examples of the contempt Mace holds for any woman or person who’s not Nancy Mace.