When Representative-elect Sarah McBride, a Delaware Democrat, won her race for the House this month, becoming the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, she knew she would face attacks from hard-right Republicans over her identity.
She just didn’t expect they would start before she had even been sworn in.
In Washington this week for new member orientation, Ms. McBride was still sitting through mandatory cybersecurity trainings, setting up her payroll, selecting district offices and learning how to introduce a bill when her new Republican colleague, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, announced plans to introduce a measure to bar transgender women from using women’s restrooms and changing rooms in the Capitol complex.
Ms. Mace did not try to pretend that she was doing anything other than targeting one individual with her resolution, even though it would apply to all employees and officers of the House.
“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say,” she told reporters on Monday night. “I mean, this is a biological man.” She said that Ms. McBride “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms — period, full stop.”
The move by Ms. Mace, one of the more attention-seeking members of the House, was straight out of the political playbook Republicans have long employed on transgender issues, which they see as an effective wedge to divide Democrats.
In the final days of the campaign, President-elect Donald J. Trump hammered Vice President Kamala Harris on her stance on transgender rights. And in the days since Democrats lost the White House and both chambers of Congress, there has been much hand-wringing among them about whether their position on the issue cost them with voters.
In the House, Republicans have spent the last two years routinely proposing legislation seeking to roll back the rights of transgender people. And across the country, Republican-led state legislatures have tried to pass laws requiring people in government buildings to use bathrooms associated with their sex assigned at birth.
But with Ms. McBride’s arrival in Washington, House Republicans for the first time have a transgender colleague to target in their own workplace.
Even their top leader did not appear to have fully anticipated how quickly that could bring the nation’s culture wars to his own doorstep. House Speaker Mike Johnson has been publicly noncommittal about the fate of Ms. Mace’s resolution, but she said he had told her he planned to include it in a package of House rules.
On Tuesday, he struggled to answer questions about the issue.
“I’m not going to engage in silly debates about this,” he said at a news conference, when pressed by a reporter about whether Ms. McBride was a man or a woman. “There’s a concern about uses of restroom facilities and locker rooms and all that. This is an issue that Congress has never had to address before. We’re going to do that in a deliberate fashion with member consensus on it, and we will accommodate the needs of every single person.”
Later, he convened reporters just off the House floor to clarify his earlier remarks. But his statement did little to clear up where he stood on the issue of Ms. Mace’s resolution.
“A man is a man, and a woman is a woman. And a man cannot become a woman,” Mr. Johnson said. “That said, I also believe that we treat everyone with dignity. We can do and believe all of those things at the same time.”
Ms. McBride, who declined to be interviewed for this story, made her way around the Capitol complex on Tuesday avoiding reporters who asked whether she anticipated needing security.
“Good to see you all,” was all she offered as a response. She had yet to meet Ms. Mace, or encounter her in the bathroom.
On social media, she posted a brief statement addressing the antics of the hard right.
“Every day Americans go to work with people who have life journeys different than their own and engage with them respectfully, I hope members of Congress can muster that same kindness,” she wrote. “This is a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing.”
Her new Democratic colleagues were emotional and outraged on Ms. McBride’s behalf.
“There was no women’s restroom off the House floor until the 1990s,” said Representative Melanie Stansbury, Democrat of New Mexico. “For my female colleagues to go publicly after another colleague, and openly attack her, I find disgusting, disgraceful, irresponsible and anti-democratic. Why are you here in this institution?”
Ms. Stansbury, whose eyes welled up as she spoke, said that if members were uncomfortable with a transgender colleague, it would be appropriate to ask questions.
“But the way in which they are doing this is not that,” she said. “It’s having an effect on millions of LGBTQ+ people across the country who are really afraid in the wake of the election of what is going to come next.”
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and majority leader, said Tuesday that the proposal was “mean” and “cruel.”
The measure in question, should it pass, would be difficult to enforce. Democrats on Tuesday asked whether its Republican proponents meant to call for strip searches or blood tests before staffers could enter a restroom. Ms. Mace has sidestepped such questions.
Ms. McBride came out in 2012, after her junior year at American University, when she wrote an opinion piece in the student newspaper divulging what she called “my deepest secret: I’m transgender.”
That was all ancient history by the time Ms. McBride ran for Congress this year. As an openly transgender member of the Delaware legislature, she was breaking barriers and everyone knew that. But her campaign was focused on paid family and medical leave, reducing child care costs and raising the minimum wage. She barely spoke about her identity.
Ms. Mace and other hard-right Republicans, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, however, have focused on it right out of the gate.
“He’s a man,” Ms. Greene told reporters bluntly on Monday night. “He’s a biological male. So he is not allowed to use our women’s restrooms, our women’s gym, our locker rooms. He’s a biological male. He has plenty of places he can go.”
Ms. Greene said she was “fed up with the left shoving their sick trans ideology down our throats and invading our spaces and women’s sports.”
Ms. Mace, for her part, referred to Ms. McBride several times as a woman, but said that she should not be allowed in women’s restrooms. She said that if the speaker did not include her proposal in the House rules, she would force a vote on it herself.
“This is a war on women, and I will be here every step of the way to protect women,” she said in a text message, noting that she had received death threats over the past 24 hours, which she had reported to the House sergeant-at-arms.
Transgender lawmakers have been targeted in other legislatures. In Montana, the Republican-led House voted to formally punish Representative Zooey Zephyr, who is transgender, by not allowing her to speak after she told supporters of a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors that they would see “blood” on their hands.
But Ms. McBride, who will be sworn in in January, has yet to give a floor speech or introduce a bill.
Some Republicans on Tuesday just wanted to sidestep the entire fracas. As he made his way into House the chamber for votes, Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, avoided questions about the news of the day.
“I’m trying to avoid the great bathroom debate,” he said.
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