Before being elected as the first transgender woman to the US Congress, 34-year-old Sarah McBride said she expected hostility. A harsh national spotlight has fallen swiftly upon her.

"They may try to misgender me, they may try to say the wrong name, they will do what we can predictably assume they might do," she told the TransLash podcast last month ahead of her resounding election victory on November 5.

"They are going to do that to get a rise out of me and my job will be to not give them the response they want," the Democrat from Delaware explained.

Ahead of her arrival in the House of Representatives on January 3, McBride was targeted by a resolution this week from a right-wing Republican colleague that would ban transgender women from women's toilets in the Capitol.

"Just because a Congressman wants to wear a mini skirt doesn’t mean he can come into a women’s bathroom," South Carolina firebrand Nancy Mace wrote on social media as she led a highly personal campaign against McBride.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, after initially seeking to buy time to debate the issue, came out in support of a ban, saying that all single-sex facilities would be "reserved for individuals of that biological sex."

McBride -- who wears knee-length dresses, not miniskirts -- issued a statement saying that she said would respect the rules "even if I disagree with them."

"I'm not here to fight about bathrooms," said the politician and activist, who transitioned as a 21-year-old and told her parents on Christmas Day 2011.

Culture wars

Donald Trump repeatedly raised transgender issues in the closing stages of his presidential campaign, with aides noting how questions around trans identity struck a nerve with swing voters.

Two of the biggest issues -- at the heart of ongoing "culture wars" between conservatives and progressives -- are whether transgender women should be allowed in women's toilets and be admitted in women's sport.

Mocking transgender athletes and "woke ideology," Trump promised to get "transgender insanity the hell out of our schools, and we will keep men out of women’s sports."

McBride has long been an advocate for trans rights and she helped campaign for a law banning gender discrimination in her home state of Delaware, during which she was publicly called a "freak" and the "devil incarnate".

"Listening to that was demeaning and dehumanizing for my child," her mother Sally told The Washington Post in a 2018 profile. "I still have a hard time coping with that."

Undeterred, McBride rode the blows and was elected as the first US transgender state senator in 2020.

Obama White House

She has been open about her mental health struggles growing up as a boy named Tim and the personal tragedy that has marked her life since, writing a memoir called "Tomorrow Will Be Different" in 2018.

"I remember as a child praying in my bed at night that I would wake up the next day and be a girl," she told a TED talk in 2016.

She first gathered major public attention with an open letter while a student leader at American University in Washington that announced her transition.

She went on to encounter President Joe Biden and his family, also Delaware natives, when she became active in grassroots politics there.

After interning at the White House under President Barack Obama, she secured an invitation to speak at the 2016 Democratic Party convention.

The White House was also the scene of her first encounter with her late husband, Andrew Cray, a transgender man and LGTBQ+ activist.

They married two years later shortly before Cray died from cancer.

Knowing the attention she is destined for in the US Congress, she says her aim is to be an effective congresswoman focused on everyday voter priorities such as housing and inflation.

But she knows she will be constantly pushed to be a spokeswoman -- and defender -- of the trans community.

"I can't do right by the trans community if I'm not being the best member of Congress that I can be for Delaware," she told TransLash.

"It's the only way that people will see that trans people can be good doctors, can be good lawyers, good educators, good members of Congress. I can't be there to put out a press release and tweet every time someone says something."

© Agence France-Presse By Adam PLOWRIGHT