Sarah McBride arrived at the Capitol on Monday in running sneakers, her feet sinking in the snow, because she forgot her boots back home in Wilmington, Delaware. The Uber dropped her off a block from her office because the area was fenced with metal - a reminder of a previous, violent Jan. 6. McBride then watched Vice President Kamala Harris certify her own loss to Donald

Trump, the leader of a party that’s often been hostile to McBride’s mere existence, and the existence of her fellow transgender Americans.

And yet McBride, 34, was chipper about her new life as a Democratic congresswoman, elected in November to represent all of Delaware in the House. “Congresswoman”? No. “Call me Sarah,” she said to a visitor in her suite, on the third floor of the Longworth House Office Building.

If Congress was high school, McBride would be the theater kid who’s always running for student-body president: sunny, over-prepared, greeting every new colleague she sees. “Like a typical, excited new freshman, I was like ‘Aw, I want everyone to be there today, and it not be a snow day!’” she said, standing by the coffee carafes in the Longworth cafeteria at lunchtime. Cream. Three Splendas. Five-plus cups a day isn’t unusual.

She does not eat breakfast or lunch, she says; her dinner order at her Taco Bell/KFC in Wilmington is insane (“Nachos and cheese, four hard tacos, one soft Taco Supreme, three crispy drumsticks and an eight-piece chicken tender thing”).

For McBride, the first out transgender member of Congress, this week has been … a lot. On Jan. 2 she rounded up family and friends to take the Amtrak to D.C. from the Joseph R. Biden Jr. station. On the commute, her best friend from middle school worried, for the first time ever, that someone could really harm her now that she’s assuming a national role. The next day McBride picked up the keys to her office and went to the House chamber for the speaker vote, where C-SPAN cameras caught her chatting with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (New York) and a couple of other Democrats, and fretting that she’d clumsily mess up Jeffries’s name during the roll-call vote. At one point Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) came over to update Jeffries on his prospects for reelection.

According to McBride, Johnson said to her and the others, with wry awareness of the mild chaos: “Welcome to Congress.”

Some Republicans have been aggressively unwelcoming, for weeks now. In late November, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) introduced a resolution to amend the House rules so lawmakers and staff couldn’t use single-sex facilities “other than those corresponding to the biological sex” of the user. Other Republicans piled on, misgendering her.

Johnson, for his part, declared that “a man cannot become a woman,” but added that everyone deserved to be treated with dignity; he would later be “warm and welcoming,” McBride says, at her ceremonial swearing-in photo with family. (Mace’s office did not respond to a request for comment on this story; Johnson’s office reiterated his statement announcing the policy.)

In the middle of new-member orientation, two days after Mace volleyed her resolution, Johnson said that he’d effectively be adopting it as House policy.

Welcome to Congress.

So, in one of her first official statements as a congresswoman-elect, McBride had to announce that she’d be following rules that she disagreed with. She says she didn’t run for Congress to be a symbol, or a spokesperson, or the first anything. She believes that being a good legislator will take care of the naysayers.

Ask McBride what that means and she’ll speak in soaring terms about improving the lives of workers and retirees in Delaware, and having a “serious willingness” to work across the aisle.

“I’m here to be a serious person,” she said, during a series of interviews in her office. “And if there are people here who don’t want to be serious, then they can answer to their constituents.”

Sarah McBride is serious.

Sarah McBride is also funny. “Sorry,” she said at one point, when her voice cracked because of a lingering head cold. “I sound like I’m going through puberty.” She snorts when she laughs.

She had the desk in her new office hauled out, because it’s a “ridiculous power move” to make visitors to sit across from one. “I’m a millennial so, of course, if I am on my computer, it’s a laptop, and I’m laying on this couch, you know? So, no need to be at a desk.”

Feed the memoirs of Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton into an A.I. bot and ask it to generate a peppy millennial politician, and you might get Sarah McBride.

She worked for Beau Biden when he was Delaware’s attorney general, and got to know the Biden family (Joe would write the foreword to her 2018 memoir). She came out as trans in a 2012 op-ed in American University’s student newspaper on her final days as - you guessed it - student-body president. And she began being the first: first trans speaker at a major-party convention, first trans state senator in the nation.

When she was working at the Center for American Progress, in 2016, one of her social media posts went viral when, in protest, she took a selfie in a women’s bathroom in North Carolina that she wasn’t legally supposed to be in. She’s since come to believe that pushing back isn’t always the best course, even when the attacks get personal.

“The older I get, the more practical I get about the necessity for grace and patience,” she said Tuesday, pouring another cup of coffee after a virtual briefing on trans kids in sports, from the Congressional Equality Caucus. “I just don’t think that getting personally hurt or demoralized or upset does anyone any good.”

McBride holds fast to the Bidenesque belief that there’s no policy issue on which she can’t find compromise, no person she can’t try to build trust with.

Does that mean she would make time for Nancy Mace?

After the caucus meeting, while heading to the House floor for her first vote - against a bill that would require the detention of any undocumented immigrant charged with theft-related crimes - McBride climbed a set of stairs to a marbled hallway on the ground floor of the Capitol. Mace rounded a corner and the two nearly brushed elbows, but they didn’t stop or acknowledge each other.

What did it feel like to run into Mace?

McBride flashed a grin. “Who?”

She continued: “It must be weirder for her than it is for me. She’s the one doing it! She’s the one making a thing about it.”

McBride doesn’t mention transgender rights when asked about her legislative priorities. When she talks about representing LGBTQ people, she makes it clear that, first and foremost, she’s representing Delawareans. Her official House bio online does not include the words “trans” or “transgender”; it does mention green technologies, mental health, Medicaid and her work for the Human Rights Campaign. She’s most passionate about reforming “care infrastructure,” such as passing paid family and medical leave - which she helped do in the Delaware state senate.

And McBride capped her first full week in office by introducing legislation, with Rep. Young Kim (R-California), to “crack down on fraudulent practices in the credit repair industry.”

This makes McBride the first freshman Democrat to introduce a bill this Congress. First, again.

You want to ask a congresswoman where she relieves herself? Is that really your most pressing question?

Fine. There’s a private restroom in her Longworth office, but that’s at least a 10-minute walk from the House chamber. So she will use the facilities in the Capitol suites of Jeffries and the Democratic whip, Katherine Clark.

That’s been the plan since before her election.

When she was running, people kept asking which bathroom she was going to use. McBride didn’t think it deserved a lot of thought, but as the election drew near, she realized: People are going to film me. People are going to film me and post it online. So she decided she wouldn’t be using any of the public women’s restrooms and made arrangements with the Democratic higher-ups to use theirs.

If Mace or Johnson had asked McBride, they would’ve known. But then Mace began her crusade, and McBride had to build this issue into her portfolio somehow. She heard from people who wanted her to fight back. Was that the right move?

“The goal of what was happening was not just to bar me from a restroom,” McBride said, sitting on her couch. “It was to caricaturize me, to turn me into a caricature of a self-obsessed, angry, trans-focused-to-the-exclusion-of-everything-else activist. That was as much, if not more, of the goal than anything else.”

Her face was absent any anger, or even irritation. This is deliberate. On the table, her coffee was going cold.

“And if I had responded that way, it would have given them exactly the response they sought. My job is to be a good member of Congress. Any other response would have undermined that.”

She spoke slowly, calmly, like she was examining each word before saying it.

“I think people misunderstand what I am here to do. I think also people misunderstand what the civil disobedience is. In this case, the disobedience is not claiming a toilet seat. The disobedience is claiming a seat in Congress and being in an institution where some people don’t want me here simply because of who I am. That’s the disobedience. The civil part is taking the indignities that come with that with my chin up.”

But Johnson’s policy doesn’t affect just her. It affects trans staffers who have been on the Hill since before she arrived. McBride tried to find out whether the ban could be limited to just lawmakers. She wasn’t spoiling for a public fight; she wanted to have a conversation.

Yet a conversation didn’t seem to be the point of the Republicans’ exercise. On Tuesday, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked McBride about working with Republicans who attack her identity, and McBride referred to “professional provocateurs parading as public officials.”

Mace responded on X by misgendering McBride and writing: “You will never be our equal.”

Sticks and stones, right? McBride has armor. Yet even a position of strength can feel lonely. Whether she likes it or not, she keeps being the first - and the first is always among people who can’t fully understand. And so, to feel less alone, she thinks of her husband, Andy, who died in 2014 of cancer. For over a decade now, she’s asked herself: What would Andy do?

So much has happened since he died. So much has changed. It’s become harder to hear him, even as it’s become easier to hear herself.

“What would Andy say in circumstances that neither he nor I, when we were together, could have conceived of?” McBride said this week. “And so this is - ”

She searched for the words.

“It’s just - ”

What, exactly?

“It’s uncharted territory.”

But that’s where she’s been headed, all along.