A Republican candidate for Delaware's lone U.S. House seat was removed from a candidate forum Thursday night after repeatedly misgendering Rep. Sarah McBride, the nation's first and only openly transgender member of Congress, drawing boos from the crowd and a public rebuke from a fellow Republican on the same stage.
What Happened at the Forum
The Jewish Federation of Delaware hosted the forum Thursday at the Siegel Jewish Community Center, drawing roughly 100 attendees to hear from candidates ahead of the 2026 midterms. Arminio, running as the Republican nominee for Delaware's at-large House seat, used the pronoun "his" and later the word "gentleman" while referring to McBride, who is a woman. The crowd responded with boos. Arminio pushed back, saying, "I would like to show respect to the speaker, that would be nice."
Moderator Ken Grant let Arminio finish before issuing a warning: "This is your final warning, if you fail to show respect to anyone else on this stage, you'll be asked to leave." When Arminio's turn came again, he acknowledged the slip. "I committed an error before, and I do acknowledge it," he said. "It's not the first error I've made in this campaign, or at any point in my future life."
About 12 minutes later, discussing rising health care costs, Arminio again referred to McBride and Sen. Chris Coons as "gentlemen." That second violation triggered his removal from the stage.
McBride's Response
Even as Arminio was being pushed toward the exit, McBride tried to keep him in the room. "I don't want this gentleman to not have the ability...," she began, before Republican Senate candidate Michael Katz cut in with his own opening statement.
I would like to apologize to everybody here and everybody else on this stage. As a physician, I believe in our common humanity and respect for each other. I feel that pain over those comments, and my apologies.
Michael Katz
Katz didn't stop at an apology. In a Facebook post published after the forum, he called on Arminio to drop out of the race entirely. "Those who seek to represent Delaware must demonstrate integrity, judgment, decency, and respect, even toward people with whom they profoundly disagree," Katz wrote, adding that Arminio's repeated conduct, after an explicit warning, "raises serious concerns about the standards we should expect from those who seek to represent us."
Not the First Time
McBride, elected in 2024 as the first openly transgender member of Congress, has faced this kind of treatment before. In 2025, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Rep. Keith Self introduced her as "Mr. McBride" during a committee meeting. That same year, the House voted to bar transgender girls and women from playing school sports on teams matching their gender identity, and House Speaker Mike Johnson barred McBride and other trans women from using women's restrooms on Capitol Hill.
McBride has also been outspoken against Executive Order 14168, which bars the federal government from recognizing transgender people's gender identity, and against Executive Order 14183, which seeks to remove transgender service members from the military and remains tied up in litigation. Long before Congress, she helped push Delaware's transgender nondiscrimination law through the state legislature as a 22-year-old activist and became the first openly trans woman to intern at the White House and to address a major party's national convention.
MQ's Take
What's striking here isn't just that Arminio misgendered a sitting congresswoman twice in one night, it's what happened around it. A crowd of about 100 people in a synagogue community center booed him without hesitation. A moderator drew a clear line and enforced it. And a rival Republican candidate, one who himself supports restrictions on transgender athletes, stood up and said the quiet part out loud: disrespect isn't a policy disagreement, it's a character problem. That's not nothing in a political moment where misgendering elected officials has become almost routine on the national stage.
McBride's instinct to let Arminio stay and speak, even after he'd targeted her twice, tracks with how she's described her own approach to this job: she didn't run to be a symbol, she ran to represent Delawareans. That kind of restraint is admirable. It shouldn't be mistaken for the incident being minor. Being misgendered in front of a room, by a man running to help write the laws that govern your rights, is not a slip of the tongue when it happens twice after a warning.
Why It Matters
Delaware hasn't sent a Republican to its House seat since 2008, and the district still leans Democratic, so this forum was unlikely to change the electoral math. But it's a preview of the tenor Arminio has brought to the race. His answers to a 2026 candidate questionnaire show he strongly agrees that gender-affirming care for minors constitutes child abuse and that marriage should be legally defined as between one man and one woman. Thursday's forum wasn't a one-off gaffe; it was consistent with the politics he's running on, in a year when trans rights remain one of the most contested fronts in American political life.
Sources: Washington Blade, LGBTQ Nation
Cover photo: Sarah McBride, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
