When you talk to Delaware’s Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress, you quickly get the sense that her critics spend a lot more time thinking about her than she does about them. When she appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation in late November, several of her soon-to-be Republican colleagues had spent the previous week not just bullying her but advancing legislation that would force her to use the men’s bathroom in the Capitol; McBride, never one to take the bait, simply brushed them off.

“I didn’t run for the United States House of Representatives to talk about what bathroom I use,” McBride told host Margaret Brennan. “I didn’t run to talk about myself.” She ran, she said, to “deliver for Delawareans” on “the issues I know keep them up at night.” It was also a classic political redirect that she delivered again and again when asked about the vicious attacks against her by congressional Republicans. But McBride really seemed to mean it.

When we met at a Wilmington coffee shop the day after her Face the Nation appearance, McBride was arguably the most famous incoming congressperson in the country—all thanks to Republicans. In November, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a resolution to ban lawmakers and House employees from “using single-sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex.” When I asked about Mace’s crusade, McBride did acknowledge that it was something of a surprise. “While I always expected there to be an effort to politicize my service or even what restroom I use, it did happen earlier than I anticipated,” she told me.

Delaware’s congresswoman-elect said she thought the bathroom conversation would take place a “little closer to January.” Instead, Mace dominated the news cycle during the middle of November, when McBride and every other member-elect assembled in Washington for their freshman orientation.

As McBride was plowing through the mundanity of being assigned a Capitol Hill office and hiring staffers, Mace was disparaging her—often in absurd publicity stunts, such as taping the word BIOLOGICAL over the women’s bathroom sign and even selling anti-trans T-shirts—on a seemingly hourly basis.

But McBride insisted that Mace’s crusade did not change her focus over the course of her freshman orientation. “If anything,” she said, “I have gotten to know my colleagues even better over the last two weeks.” Mace’s bullying campaign, she argued, even had a silver lining: All the attention, she said, helped “elevate the needs of Delawareans and the issues that they elected me to work on even more than before.” Later in our conversation, the avowed Swiftie joked that Taylor Swift’s song “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” had lately been on her Spotify a lot.

Despite—or perhaps because of—her status as a trailblazer, McBride has always talked in measured, practical tones. Throughout her nascent political career—she is just 34 years old—she has avoided the hot-button culture war issues that increasingly define American politics, even as she herself has become a button. Dismissing the bathroom debate as a “manufactured culture war crisis,” she avoids taking the bait, and always pivots back to her constituents........

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