AOC calls Republican Capitol bathroom ban targeting Sarah McBride ‘disgusting’

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has defended Representative Sarah McBride and criticized House Republicans’ efforts to ban trans people from using bathrooms on Capitol Hill that match their gender identity.

The new restrictions, introduced by Republican representative Nancy Mace and supported by the GOP speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, bans transgender people, including congressional members, officers and employees, from using the single-sex bathrooms and other facilities in the Capitol and House office buildings that correspond to their gender identity.

The effort targets Democrat Sarah McBride, the first out transgender person elected to the US House of Representatives from Delaware, who is set to take office in January.

In a press interview on Wednesday evening, Ocasio-Cortez stood up for McBride and criticized Mace and the Republican lawmakers backing the bill, telling reporters that the proposed restrictions are “endangering all women and girls”.

“If you ask them what is your plan to enforce this is, they won’t come up with an answer,” the New York lawmaker said. “What it inevitably results in are women and girls who are primed for assault because people are going to want to check their private parts in suspecting who is trans and who is cis and who is doing what.”

“And so the idea that Nancy Mace wants little girls and women to drop trou[sers] in front of who? An investigator? Who would that be? Because she wants to suspect and point fingers at who she thinks is trans?” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It is disgusting.”

Ocasio-Cortez concluded her remarks by saying that her Republican colleagues are pursuing these efforts so that “Nancy Mace can make a buck and fundraise off an email”.

“They’re not doing this to protect people,” she said. “They’re endangering women, they’re endangering girls of all kind, and everybody should reject it, it’s gross.”

Mace later responded to Ocasio-Cortez, telling Fox News, “I love living rent-free in AOC’s tiny little brain,” and rejected the claims that she is endangering women.

Earlier on Wednesday, McBride responded to the ban and the GOP speaker’s support for it, saying that she is “not here to fight about bathrooms” but “here to fight for Delaware and to bring down costs facing families”.

“Like all members, I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them,” she said, adding that “this effort to distract from the real issues facing this country hasn’t distracted me over the last several days”.

Johnson issued a statement supporting the effort on Wednesday morning, stating that all single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House office buildings were “reserved for individuals of that biological sex”.

Online, supporters of McBride and trans rights have come to her defense and spoken out against Mace’s efforts.

Author and political commentator Jared Yates Sexton wrote online that she “shouldn’t have to deal with this shit” and “shouldn’t be defined by it”.

Yates Sexton added that the Democrats should be “fighting for her”.

One of Mace’s former aides, Natalie Johnson, lambasted the efforts on social media, writing: “if you think this bill is about protecting women and not simply a ploy to get on Fox News, you’ve been fooled.”

Some online have also expressed disappointment that there are not more Democratic lawmakers who are publicly defending McBride.

One Bluesky user said that they called their congressperson, “who just won his seat, to encourage him to stand up for Sarah McBride”.

“If I had friends standing up for me in school when I was being bullied, it would’ve made me feel a lot better,” they said. “I wasn’t able to defend myself without the bullying getting worse.”

Writer and professor Roxane Gray wrote on social media that she keeps “thinking about those congresspeople kneeling in the rotunda wearing kente cloth scarves, very performative”.

“There has been no loud, visible, unified support for Sarah McBride from the democrats,” she continued. “It’s a real disgrace. That is your colleague! They are bullying her in your faces. And silence!”