Sarah McBride is the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, but she is not the first trans politician to be banned from using the bathroom of her choice by a hostile fellow lawmaker.
In 2006, Italy’s newly elected Vladimir Luxuria was briefly barred from using the ladies’ room as she took up her seat in parliament. She said her heart breaks for McBride, a Democrat from Delaware.
“They did that to me,” Luxuria, 59, said in a telephone interview with NBC News from her home in Rome. “What is happening to Sarah McBride is rank politics.”
Which bathroom McBride will be able to use in the next Congress became an issue last week when Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican and staunch supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, introduced a resolution to ban lawmakers and House staff from “using use of single sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex.”
When asked if the move was specifically in response to McBride, Mace said: “Yes and absolutely, and then some.” Not long after, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is also a Republican and a Trump supporter, said he supports limiting “single-sex facilities” in the Capitol, including restrooms, to “individuals of that biological sex ‘.
Delaware Representative-elect Sarah McBride
McBride responded in a post on I hope members of Congress can show that same kindness.”
Luxuria, who left Parliament in 2008 and is an actress and activist, followed in the footsteps of the late Georgina Beyer, a New Zealander who became the world’s first openly transgender MP when she was elected in 1999.
The only other transgender woman to have served in a national parliament is Poland’s Anna Grodzka, who was elected in 2011 and served a four-year term.
Luxuria said she had endured a lifetime of “cruelty” but was still shocked when Italian MP Elisabetta Gardini, a supporter of then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, confronted her “outside the women’s toilet.”
“I always went to the ladies’ room because if I even tried to use the men’s room, they would be embarrassed and demand to know what I was doing there,” Luxuria said. “So when I came out, I was surprised when Gardini started shouting at me: ‘What were you doing here! You’re a man!'”
Luxuria said Gardini was “very angry” but she was determined not to give up.
She told Gardini, “Okay, I’m a trans woman. But if you don’t want to see me here, you have to go to the men’s room.”
Luxuria said Gardini walked away angrily and that in no time “the issue of where I could go to the toilet became a debate in parliament.”
“I was lucky because in the end the MPs decided to let me use the women’s toilet,” she said. “But it was embarrassing that it became a problem.”
Luxuria said she has her suspicions about why Gardini, who was a well-known actress and popular TV personality before entering politics, went after her.
“I suspect that Berlusconi’s party wanted to make a point of this to attack my party, which was in the opposition,” she said. “So I have a lot of sympathy for Sarah McBride.”
Gardini did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Noting that Mace once described herself as a pro-LGBTQ social moderate, Luxuria said she thinks Mace’s attack on McBride was part of a larger plan to try to divide Democrats and force them to defend an issue that many Americans still always ‘uncomfortable’.
“The goal here is to generate hatred for political purposes,” Luxuria said.
McBride and Mace did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment.
In the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump, some Democrats and pundits have pointed to the Biden administration’s support for transgender rights as one reason Republicans gained the upper hand.
They noted that Republicans spent more than $200 million on network television ads that highlighted Harris’ past support for taxpayer-funded gender-affirming health care treatments and aired repeatedly during NFL and college football games.
During her four years in the Polish parliament, Grodzka also faced verbal attacks and was repeatedly mistreated by fellow Polish MP Krystyna Pawlowicz. In an interview with Pink News, a digital LGBTQ news channel based in Britain, in 2013, Grodzka largely dismissed the transphobic comments.
“Krystyna is a very conservative person, so I think I’m probably a little too much for her,” Grodza said. “She has an imaginary idea of one [perfect] person who should go to church, etc. … In that case I ruin her photo, therefore it is a reason for her to attack me.”
In recent years – almost a decade after she left parliament – Grodzka continues to face occasional personal attacks from Polish lawmakers as the country’s right wing has embraced anti-LGBTQ sentiment.
In a 2002 documentary about Beyer called “Georgie Girl,” Beyer said she often faced questions about her gender identity that other politicians wouldn’t have to endure.
“I get asked questions that no other politician should ever have to answer,” she said. “As for the surgery, you know. “Did it hurt?” or, ‘If you have sex now as a woman, is that different from how you had sex as a man?’ Well, honey, of course.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
