Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware responds after Rep. Keith Self calls her "Mister": "It is weird and it is bizarre"
Rep. Sarah McBride, who represents Delaware, said she will not "take a lecture on decorum from a party that incited an insurrection" a day after her colleague in the House of Representatives referred to her as "Mister," leading to an exchange that shut down a committee meeting Wednesday.
McBride, a Democrat and the first openly transgender member of Congress, said Thursday that she appears "to live rent-free in the minds of some of my Republican colleagues."
"I wish they would spend even a fraction of the time that they spend thinking about me, thinking about how to lower the costs for American families," she said.
During a House Committee on Foreign Affairs meeting Wednesday, Rep. Keith Self, a Republican from Texas, referred to McBride, who is a transgender woman, as "Mr. McBride."
McBride responded, "Thank you, Madam Chair."
Rep. William Keating interjected, asking Self to repeat his introduction and then saying, "Mr. Chairman, have you no decency? I have come to know you a little bit, but that is not decent."
Self referred to McBride as "Mr. McBride" again and said the hearing would continue, but Keating, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said, "You will not continue it with me unless you introduce a duly elected representative the right way."
Self then adjourned the meeting.
In a post on social media later Wednesday, Self said, "It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female."
President Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20, the day he was inaugurated, that "asserts the U.S. will recognize two sexes, male and female." The order is part of a broader push by the Trump administration to curtail the rights of transgender people, including by removing transgender members of the military and ending federal support for care for trans children.
McBride has said that she intends to focus on issues facing everyday Delawareans and Americans rather than culture war issues, and she was the first freshman Democrat to introduce a bill this year — a bipartisan effort aimed at preventing scams in the credit repair industry.
"The Republican party is obsessed with culture war issues," McBride said when responding to Wednesday's incident. "It is weird, and it is bizarre, and the American people deserve serious legislators, serious elected officials who are focused on bringing people together to deliver real results for the American people. Not to play games and not to engage in schoolyard taunts."
Weeks after McBride was elected Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, introduced legislation to change House rules to limit use of single-sex bathrooms in the Capitol complex to those corresponding to users' "biological sex."
McBride said at the time the legislation was an attempt "to get headlines and to manufacture a crisis."
"Delawareans reinforce that in our state of neighbors, we are fair-minded, and we judge candidates based on their ideas and not their identities," McBride told CBS News Philadelphia.
McBride was elected in November after serving in the Delaware state legislature.
