“They use reality TV strategies.” – Mother Jones

My red carpet interview with The representative Sarah McBride (d-Del.) During the first of the Saturday of a new documentary on her history election as the first openly transgender member of the Congress was interrupted by a worship passerby.

“Sarah, I love you!” Cried man. “I am a donor and I don’t even live in the neighborhood!” (“Thank you for everything you do!”, The MP replied.)

The fact that the 34 -year -old Delaware deputy has a national fans base, And is the subject of a documentary, First stateWho created the Tribeca Film Festival less than six months after its inauguration, is only surprising if you are not familiar with the role of McBride as a pioneer in American politics.

Last November, she became the first transgender first person elected to the Congress, surpassing vice-president Kamala Harris among the smallest (and first) state voters in the country. Before that, she was the first openly trans senator from the country when she used the general assembly of Delaware. Her election to the Congress brought not only a national projector, but also anti-transmies of the GOP legislators once she took office. There have also been criticisms of certain trans people who wanted McBride to be stronger in their name while the Republicans are mounting a large scale against trans rights.

First state Describes McBride struggling with the ups and downs of what it meant to enter into his role. It resists an easy story on life as a “first” being a ascending trajectory of progress and celebration. For McBride, he was also heavy with impossible expectations, contradictory allegiances and flattened representations. As McBride sums up from the start of the film: “It is an incredible challenge to understand how I am considered a full human being rather than a flag of transmission.”

Part of this challenge came from his GOP colleagues. In a scene, McBride looks at the representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA.) Attack him with insults on the Podcast by Steve Bannon. “She is just going to act like that every day,” said McBride to a member of the campaign staff while looking at the clip while sitting on a sofa, “and my work will be not to answer.”

This self-imposed challenge was put to the test only a few weeks after her election, when the representative Nancy Mace (RS.C.) introduced a resolution seeking to prevent McBride from using the toilets of women. This decision led to a swarm of media coverage. Democrats and LGBTQ defenders rushed to the defense of McBride. The president of the Mike Johnson room (R-La) finally announced that he would support a bathroom ban in the Capitol and Implicit This McBride should use the private bathroom from its office or one of the building’s unisex bathrooms. Greene would have even threatened to fight a transgender woman if she was trying to use a bathroom for women in the part of the Maison du Capitole.

McBride refused to take the bait. She published a statement that did not mention Mace by name but called chaos sown by the bathroom, an effort to distract real problems distressing the majority of Americans. “We have to focus on reducing the cost of housing, health care and childcare services, and not manufacturing wars.” After Johnson announced that he would move to enforce the ban on toilets (the day of the transgender day, no less), McBride published another longer declaration saying that she would follow the rules “even if I do not agree with them.” But for some trans defenders who wanted McBride to Riposte, his answer came as a “betrayal”.

The documentary has the most extensive and personal comments of McBride on the debacle to date.

“Disobedience does not take a seat in the toilet; disobedience takes this seat at the congress,” said McBride in a scene by leading his car after an orientation to DC for first -year legislators. “It is not only that they do not want me in the bathrooms; They don’t want me at Congress. “

“A victory for them is that I retire and that I transform myself into a caricature,” she continues. “There would be a bonus on my head if I said that I refused to comply. I refuse to be martyred. I want to be a member of the Congress. ” And in what is perhaps its most frank assessment of the risks it faces, McBride says: “It is difficult to play in the long game when your life in the short term is in danger.”

McBride manages to show an unshakable faith that she will be able to move culture to Congress, even if her strategy to do so is not the one that some defenders wanted. “The power of proximity, the power of our presence – that does not change everything, but it has an impact,” explains McBride in the scene of the car. “There are people who think that the representation is not important at all and there are people who think it will solve everything, and it’s somewhere in the middle.”

The film also shows the ways in which McBride’s family, democratic allies and A continuous offer from Wawa Coffee supported him during the campaign and his first days in power. In a plate with the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN.Y.), pioneering legislators discuss the most difficult parts of the creation of history. “What people don’t see and what they don’t really live is that being the first means being the only one,” Ocasio-Cortez in McBride told. “What they are looking for is your essential dignity as a human being. And, to be frank, this is what makes me really piss off on this subject, “she adds, referring to the ban on toilets.

“I want to respect your autonomy and I want to respect your story and how you want to manage this for yourself, but I also want to timer these embciluses,” adds Ocasio-Cortez.

McBride’s strategy seems to have borne fruit: Mace and Greene have since attracted their attention elsewhere, and McBride has succeeded in working with colleagues through the aisle to present and copard several elements of bipartite legislation.

“You must delete incentives to these people, because in the end, the incentive is attention,” said McBride during a round table after New York first. “They use reality TV strategies.”

McBride, on the other hand, describes itself as “quite disciplined” in the way it leads to power. But she makes room for humor: after the credits, there is a short video of McBride who visits her office at the Congress – including the bathroom.

“It’s incredible,” she says, when she enters inside, “that I haven’t just ignited.”

First state The next show at DC / Dox Film Festival in Washington, DC on June 15.