Given that members of Congress get their own private bathrooms, the recent flap over how to accommodate the lavatorial needs of the soon-to-be lone transgender female member of the U.S. House of Representatives might be Capitol Hill’s most asinine debate of the year (well, at least the worst not involving Matt Gaetz and whether he possessed even a tiny shard of qualification to serve as U.S. attorney general, a nomination for which he mercifully removed himself).

Yet there was U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, the South Carolina Republican, pushing her resolution banning transgender women from using women’s bathrooms in the U.S. Capitol. Again. And again. And again with, among things, hundreds of social media posts. Considering there will be only one openly transgender woman in Congress beginning on Jan. 3, newly elected U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride, a 34-year-old Delaware Democrat who has served as a national spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, this might be viewed as a personal attack. After all, Mace posed her resolution in public safety terms — as if transgender women were busy attacking people in public bathrooms (which studies suggest they don’t, ever).

And how did Representative-elect McBride respond to this bluster? By refusing to engage. Over and over again on various media platforms, she said she wasn’t elected to discuss bathroom protocol but to advance the interests of her constituents on matters of housing, health care and child care. During a recent network TV interview, she summed up the attack against her as this: “an attempt to distract from what [Republicans] are actually doing.” If only her fellow Democrats had demonstrated such discipline in recent months, they might have fared better in the last election.

You think it’s easy to listen to someone attack you (and the LGBTQ+ community generally) on this absurd premise? McBride’s response is a master class in the power of self-control. The episode is not unlike those nonviolent 1960s lunch counter civil rights sit-ins where participants endured heckling and harassment but did not retaliate. Sometimes the most effective tool in the civil rights arsenal is simply to expose the haters for hating.

It’s easy to be cynical these days. Transgender women are a tiny fraction of the population (perhaps 1% of the U.S. population) but they certainly set certain fixated social conservatives on edge — in how they dress or go to school or participate in sports or go to the bathroom. Often, it’s just about scaring like-minded people into full panic mode with scurrilous claims, a technique authoritarians often use.

Whatever the motivation, we would proudly claim McBride as an official near-Marylander. She may be from Delaware but her focus, her discipline and her courage would always be welcome in the Free State.