A video posted on Facebook Wednesday shows two women from the UK harassing Delaware-native and transgender activist Sarah McBride during a meeting in Washington, D.C.

McBride, who is the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT civil rights advocacy group in the U.S., handled the situation calmly and did not respond to the women's anti-trans comments.

Afterward, on Twitter, McBride said: "Throughout the incident, I thought about the trans youth who have to experience their hostility and bullying day-in and day-out in the United Kingdom.

"The sad truth is that this kind of harassment is the reality for far too many transgender people, particularly trans women of color, across the country and around the world."

The woman who shot the video, Posie Parker, is a UK blogger who runs the anti-trans group Standing For Women. The other woman is Julia Long, an author.

Both are considered trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, who do not acknowledge transgender women as women.

In the video, they also misgender McBride, referring to her as a man.

"This is Sarah McBride, he gets paid probably quite a lot of money to lobby the government to try and make sure that women and girls have absolutely no right to any space anymore," Parker says in the video.

Long accuses McBride of hating lesbians and encouraging male violence against women.

"Everyone, this is Sarah McBride," Parker says at the end of the video. "Ignoring women and girls' concerns as usual. So typically male."

Pushing for equal rights

In a video posted Monday, Parker said she was in town for an event held by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank that held a discussion on “the left’s embrace of the transgender agenda."

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is currently pushing the Equality Act, which would have legal ramifications for those who don’t agree with the transgender agenda," said the foundation's senior research fellow Ryan T. Anderson in a blog post about the event. "If 'gender identity' becomes a protected class in federal civil rights law, as Pelosi’s Equality Act would result in, there will be serious negative consequences."

A transgender person is someone whose sex assigned at birth is different from who they identify as on the inside. Since January 2013, at least 102 transgender people in the U.S. have been the victims of fatal violence, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

Research has shown that transgender people around the world and in the United States are exposed to widespread social stigma, discrimination, harassment, and physical and sexual abuse, according to the American Journal of Public Health.

That's one reason advocates are fighting for additional legal protections.

The Human Rights Commission in a statement condemned the two women and the Heritage Foundation for the attack on McBride.

"It is disturbing but not at all surprising that anti-transgender extremists brought to the United States at the behest of the Heritage Foundation would stoop to harassing a transgender woman and parents of transgender youth," Olivia Dalton, HRC's senior vice president for communications and marketing, said in a statement.

"That the targeted harassment occurred following a moving meeting between parents of trans kids and members of Congress reinforces the massive gap between our message of love and their agenda of bigotry. No one advocating for their basic human rights should face such hate and hostility, and shame on the Heritage Foundation for fostering this kind of atmosphere."

On Wednesday, McBride also attended a public meeting hosted by Rep. Joseph Kennedy III, D-Mass., chair of the Transgender Equality Task Force.

The parents of several transgender children shared stories about the hardships their families have encountered, as well as feedback on anti-trans policies enacted by the Trump administration.

They are asking Congress to pass the Equality Act, a comprehensive LGBTQ civil rights bill that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

“Our families need the Equality Act to become law,” Rachel Gonzales, a member of HRC's Parents for Transgender Equality, was quoted in a blog post by McBride.

“As residents of Texas, our family has experienced first hand the threat of both a hostile state government and cruel federal administration. Our state or zip code should not dictate whether our daughter is protected from discrimination.”

Support for McBride pours in

McBride, 28, first made headlines in 2012 when, at the end of her term as student body president at American University, she came out publicly as transgender in the student newspaper.

She went on to serve as an intern in the White House that year, the first openly transgender woman to do so. After graduating from college, she helped lead a successful effort to pass gender identity nondiscrimination protections in Delaware.

In 2016, she became the first openly transgender person to speak at one of the major political parties’ national conventions.

"Today in America, LGBTQ people are targeted by hate that lives in both laws and hearts," McBride told the Democratic convention crowd, including cheering Delaware delegates. "Many will struggle just to get by. But I believe tomorrow can be different."

McBride was also a tenacious campaigner and friend to both the late attorney general Beau Biden and former Gov. Jack Markel. Former Vice President Joe Biden, whom McBride first met in 2002, recently wrote the forward to her book, "Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Transgender Equality."

After McBride was harassed Wednesday, support poured in for her on Twitter.

Chelsea Clinton thanked McBride for her work, while Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Commission, praised her for being "one of the strongest, bravest advocates" he knows.

Laverne Cox, an LGBTQ advocate and actress who appeared in "Orange is the New Black" also tweeted in support, as well as hundreds of others.

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Contact Jessica Bies at (302) 324-2881 or jbies@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @jessicajbies.

