Trans Lawmaker on New Doc ‘State of Firsts’

On election night, as she endured the grueling hours between polling place closures and the first waves of results, Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) declared that she was going to throw up.

“It’s weird to know that you’re in a fork in your life as it’s actually happening,” McBride said, shortly before giddily announcing to her campaign staff that early results showed her overperforming former vice president and 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. 

The unguarded moment will be revealed for the first time on Saturday, when State of Firsts — a new documentary from director Chase Joynt and producers Jenna Kelly and Justin Lacob —  premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. 

The documentary follows McBride over the course of her successful campaign to become the first openly transgender person ever elected to Congress, and the onslaught of Republican attacks against her after she won.  

“One of the things that wasn’t captured is that I was worried that I was going to underperform because I was trans,” McBride tells Rolling Stone ahead of the film’s debut. “Right before the polls closed, I said, OK, I think I underperformed by two points,’ and I would have been happy just to perform on par with other Democrats. For that not to have been the case was meaningful to me, given my expectations.” 

When the votes were fully tallied, McBride won the election handily despite targeted attacks against her identity as a transgender woman from her local opponents, and a national campaign vilifying transgender Americans by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. McBride’s historic victory in Delaware was one of the few highlights for Democrats on Election Night, as by the following morning Trump had soundly defeated Harris, and by the end of the week Republicans had seized control of both chambers of Congress. 

State of Firsts paints a picture of a woman caught in a tug of war between the laurels of historic achievement, the expectations of both her constituents in Delaware as well as the trans community, and the emotional terror of being a target of the GOP’s anti-trans vitriol.

The documentary goes behind the scenes of McBride’s response to Republican efforts to ban her from using women’s bathrooms in the Capitol following her election. Before McBride even took her oath of office, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) — who in 2023 called herself “pro-transgender rights” — and Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) launched a public effort to have their newly elected colleague banned from using the women’s restroom and other sex-segregated spaces for women in the Capitol. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would ultimately enforce such a rule. 

“If you would have asked me three months ago what bathroom I would use in the Capitol, I would have said, ‘Oh I’ll just use the women’s restroom,” or [that I would] “just go to the private bathrooms,” McBride recalls in the film during a venting session in her car. “And then the election happened, and Republicans maintained control of the House, and I started to think ‘they’re going to try to ban me from the restrooms.’”

McBride emphasizes throughout the documentary that at different points in her life she has oscillated between the roles of advocate and activist — and considers them to be distinct. As a lawmaker, the congresswoman maintains that her role is not to become embroiled in public spats with Republicans hellbent on making an example of her, but to be the most effective member of Congress she can be. “A win for them is not me not using the restroom. A win for them is me fighting back and them turning me into a caricature. A win for them is undermining my effectiveness as a member of Congress,” she says to the camera in State of Firsts. 

McBride’s decision to abide by Johnson’s bathroom decree was not without controversy within the trans and LGBTQ+ community, but she stands by it. 

“I think there is actually something so powerful about seeing someone with dignity and calmness navigate a firestorm — because then it creates a really clear contrast between you and those who are coming after you,” McBride tells Rolling Stone. “I am more confident now than I was even then about my approach, about the rightness of my approach. I’m more confident now because I’ve seen the behavior dissipate and diminish. I’m more confident now because I’ve seen that my effectiveness has actually been enhanced by the way that I navigated this.”

“I appreciate that when you are a ‘first,’ people viscerally feel your highs, and they viscerally feel your lows,” she adds about the public reaction to her colleagues’ attacks against her. “But I am confident that for both myself, my constituents, and all of the various communities I’m a part of that the approach that I have taken has maximized the positives for the long term, maintained my effectiveness, and enhanced my effectiveness.” 

The film is premiering during the first week of June’s Pride Month celebrations, which are taking place amid a palpable climate of anxiety as the Trump administration continues to attack the LGBTQ+ community. Earlier this week, reports emerged that the Pentagon had chosen to time the announcement of their decision to strip the USNS Harvey Milk of its name to coincide with Pride Month. 

State of Firsts director Chase Joynt, who is also trans, tells Rolling Stone that in his view “there’s never been a more important time to be telling trans stories and to be getting as close to issues, people, and politics as possible. I think that it has never felt more urgent to be creating work [and] creating media that can be considered as counter to the onslaught of misinformation and anti-trans legislation.” 

“My sincere hope is that through this portal, through this access, audiences emerge with greater understanding of not only trans rights and the specifics of what’s happening to trans people, but also the fact that we are dealing with issues that are so much more in excess of one community, one person, one moment or one time,” he adds. 

Joynt explains that he wanted to explore the complexities of being a “first” through the lens of McBride’s election. ”The history of trans representation is a history that positions one person as exceptional and away from that pack. There’s always that icon, that person to whom we’re looking, and it’s a fantasy,” he says, adding that the documentary would ideally allow viewers to grapple with the weight and expectations of being in such a position through the perspective of an aspiring candidate. 

McBride’s aspirations are a central theme of her story. Early in the film, her father recounts how as a child McBride was obsessed with the podium he used to teach classes at their church. When her parents got her a podium of her own, a young McBride would practice reciting famous American political speeches. “I just thought to myself, ‘Ooh, we’re in deep trouble here,’” her father tells the filmmakers, with her mother adding that while she was confident her daughter would win her election, the thought of her stepping onto the national stage under a Trump presidency “scares” her.

McBride tells Rolling Stone that she would reassure that child — full of ambition, a fixation on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1932 inaugural address, and a blissful ignorance of the many trials to come — that everything would work out. 

“It’s not always easy. It’s often two steps forward, one step back. It’s going to be painful. They’re going to be moments where you just want to disappear, that you want to go into hiding, that you wonder whether everything will work out,” she says. “But I wish I had known then — and there are times where I still have to summon this —that it was going to be OK.” 

“There are so many reasons for us to have hope from the historic progress that we are the beneficiaries of right now, the fact that we are all in so many ways, living in possibility,” McBride says. “What we celebrate this Pride Month is that for our community, we have a superpower — and the superpower is the power of our proximity. When we are proximate, when we are present, when we show up as the best versions of ourselves and the most authentic versions of ourselves, we have the capacity to open hearts, change minds and transform that which once seemed so impossible that it was almost incomprehensible.”