Montana legislators rejected an attempt to ban Zooey Zephyr, a transgender member of the state House of Representatives, from using the women's restroom at the state Capitol, with some Republicans joining Democrats in opposing the measure reut.rs/4g94EGu
— Reuters (@reuters.com) December 3, 2024 at 11:43 PM
Revanchist laws get dragged up to the Supreme Court when their arguments have already been lost. Loving v. Virginia was decided after To Kill A Mockingbird had become a bestseller, won a Pulitzer, and been made into a hit film. Obergefell v. Hodges came after 36 states had legalized same-sex marriage. Even the vile Dobbs v. Jackson ruling, culmination of a 50-year crusade against womens’ autonomy, has hardly been the success its promulgators expected.
Too many people will suffer, and sometimes die, because it makes powerful bigots nervous that other people might make choices which the bigots hate and fear. But it’s not as though even the most news-averse voter hasn’t seen transgender actors, models, and fellow citizens on their televisions and in their neighborhoods. I can only hope this upsets the bigots badly enough to shorten their public lives.
From the New Yorker, “Sarah McBride Wasn’t Looking for a Fight on Trans Rights”:
Not long after the November election, new members of Congress gather for a couple of weeks of orientation. Consistent with that tradition, Sarah McBride, a Delaware Democrat, made the short trip from Wilmington to D.C. to meet with her fellow first-termers. At a hotel in the capital, she learned about the lottery for office space, how to assemble a staff, and the intricacies of the legislative process. As the first transgender member of Congress in history, she also experienced an orientation in naked aggression. Within days of her arrival, Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, introduced a resolution that would restrict access to all “single-sex facilities” on Capitol Hill to those of the “corresponding biological sex.” In other words, Mace sought a bathroom bill—and made clear that she “absolutely” intended it as a reaction to McBride…
McBride was born in Wilmington; her father was a lawyer and her mother a high-school guidance counselor. At American University, she was active in Democratic politics and worked on Beau Biden’s campaign for Delaware attorney general. In her senior year, she served as student-body president, and ended her term by publishing a moving coming-out article for the Eagle, the A.U. paper, called “The Real Me.”
McBride had been hesitant to acknowledge her trans identity, she explained, because that might prevent her from pursuing a career in politics. “I wrestled with the idea that my dream and my identity seemed mutually exclusive; I had to pick,” she wrote. In the end, she realized that she would have to embrace both: “My life was passing me by, and I was done wasting it as someone I wasn’t.”
In 2020, McBride was elected to the Delaware State Senate. And this November she was elected to the United States House. At the start of our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, she seemed determined to keep her cool, despite the insult she had just suffered. “I think in many ways I got a fuller orientation this week, where I actually got to see not just the nuts and bolts of Congress,” she said drily, “but also some of the performance of Congress, too.”
When I was watching this play out on television, reading about it, in the past week or two, I looked up how the first Black member of Congress was received, Hiram Revels. This is in the nineteenth century. He was treated with a great deal more respect than you were. I understand your desire to be poised about this, and straightforward, and to move the issues to the issues you ran on. But I wonder what your emotional reaction was to what you could only have taken as an enormous gesture of deep disrespect.
Look, I’m human, and it never feels good to be used as an opportunity to get headlines. It never feels good to have people talk about deeply personal things. I think I knew what I was signing up for, though; I know what the Republican Party in this country, in Congress, has become.
Which is what?
A party that is more interested in performance art and being professional provocateurs than being serious legislators and a serious governing party. I think they have come to the conclusion that they are able to get enough votes if they occasionally throw red meat to folks, because that red meat might satiate what is an authentic crisis of hope that I think people across this country face right now.
I think we have to be crystal clear in calling them out on what they are doing, and pull the curtain back to really dull the effect that these manufactured culture wars have on the American voter. Some people do receive this red meat, and it resonates with them—it makes them feel better, but it doesn’t actually address the real pain in their lives. And I think we should be calling that out and obviously modelling an approach to governing that genuinely solves the real problems that people are facing that create a level of insecurity and fear that allows for culture wars to satiate at least something instantaneously.
But I truly believe that if we solve problems, if we are serious, people respond. I’ve seen that in Delaware as we have passed paid leave, raised the minimum wage. Voters here in Delaware are sort of bucking this national trend. We’ve expanded our majorities both in 2022 and 2024 in the Delaware General Assembly, I believe, as a byproduct of a record of results that voters are responding to, and a message focussed on kitchen-table issues and economic issues. And it’s allowed us to not only expand our majorities but to break through the culture wars that the Republican Party has pursued. Because we’re in Delaware, in the Philadelphia media market—we are getting those anti-trans Trump ads pumped into our state like we were in Pennsylvania. And yet, despite that, running on a message of paid leave, higher minimum wage, union protections, a trans candidate not only won here in Delaware but actually outperformed every major Democrat running for major office in Delaware statewide.
And yet the notorious ads that ended with “Kamala Harris is for they/them, President Trump is for you”—ads that were oriented around anti-trans sentiment—not only did they occur, they worked. Certainly, they worked in the interpretation of not only the Republicans but the press at large. They ran them over and over again and poured millions of dollars into them.
So, first off, I think there are two things. One, this country is still entering into a conversation about trans people. This country still is at a Trans 101 spot. And one of the things I think Democrats have to be more mindful of is that leaders should always be out in front of public opinion, but, in order to foster change in public opinion, we’ve got to be within arm’s distance of the public so that we can pull them along with us. If we get too out ahead of it, we lose our grip and we’re unable to pull the public with us…
But I actually want to say something on those ads, because you did say the key sentence in that ad. It wasn’t the surgery point, it wasn’t the undocumented-immigrant point, it wasn’t the trans point, it was the concept in that line that Kamala Harris, according to the ad, was for a small group of people, and Donald Trump was there for “you.” The lesson of this moment, of this last week, is that we should be flipping that script. Because that’s the authentic thing—Kamala Harris was for everyone. And Democrats are for everyone. And every single time Republicans focus in on a small vulnerable group of people, not only are they trying to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions—not only are they trying to employ the politics of misdirection, to move your attention away from the fact that in that same moment they’re trying to pick the pocket of American workers, undermine union protections, and fleece seniors by privatizing Medicare through the back door—but every bit of time and energy that is diverted to attack trans people, that diverts the attention of the federal government away toward attacking trans people, is time and energy that is not being spent on you. It’s time and attention that’s not being spent on raising your wages or improving your benefits or lowering the cost of living. These attacks have costs. Republicans are focussed on attacking a small group of people, and we are here to actually address the issues that you care about…
We began our conversation with you talking about how moved you were to be in the halls of Congress for the first time as a soon-to-be member, and seeing and sensing all that had happened in progressive terms, in liberatory terms, over time and in previous centuries. My guess is that this is not going to characterize the next two years for you in Congress. The Democratic Party, in large measure, will be fighting a rear-guard action against all kinds of initiatives by a Trump Presidency in a Republican Congress. How do you anticipate the coming next two years? What kind of role will the Democrats and you play? What will be your day-to-day life, do you think?
Well, there’s no question that we’ve got our work cut out for us. There’s no question that we’re going to have to push back on a lot of damaging and dangerous policies.
But, look, I think the biggest challenge for us is not that we understand that there’s a fight. And we will do the work. The challenge is going to be to summon the hope necessary to see that fight through. I think that one of the challenges that we have in this country right now, particularly for Democrats, is that, really since the nineteen-sixties, it has felt like if we simply work for it, if we vote for it, if we volunteer, if we share our stories, if we lift our voices, that we can then inevitably bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice. And we felt that, I think particularly, in 2008 and when we elected Barack Obama, and then A.C.A. passed, and marriage equality became a law of the land. It just felt like there was this sort of unfolding sense of great progress.
It feels different right now. It doesn’t feel like, if we simply work for it and fight for it, that change will come, that things will work out. We can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. But the other thing that I thought about, as I sat in that chair on the floor of the House, was about not only the elected officials that served there but all of the advocates and activists and citizens who lived through those different chapters in our country’s history. We have to recognize that that sense of inevitability with hard work that we felt twenty years ago, thirty years ago—that’s the exception in our country’s history. Every single previous generation of Americans has been called to conquer odds much greater than the ones that we’re facing right now. And they had every reason to believe that change would not come. They could not see the light at the end of the tunnel. Enslaved people in the eighteen-fifties had no reason to believe that an Emancipation Proclamation was on the horizon. Unemployed workers during the early days of the Great Depression had never heard of a New Deal. Patrons at the Stonewall Inn never knew of a country where they could live openly and authentically as themselves. And yet they persevered. They summoned their hope, they found that light, and ultimately they changed the world…
Hope is not always an organic emotion. Sometimes we have to consciously find it and consciously summon it. And, yes, there are big challenges right now. Maybe those challenges are insurmountable. Maybe we will be, because of social media, incapable of restoring our capacity to have a national dialogue. Maybe because of the culture that we live in right now, we will no longer be able to have conversations across disagreement. Maybe because of unchecked wealth and corporate power, we won’t be able to conquer climate change. The list goes on. Maybe. But we would be the first generation of Americans to give up on this country, and we would be the first generation of Americans who were unable to find the path forward. And I just don’t believe that we are. And I certainly believe that we don’t have to be.
FINAL CHECK: Find Your Guys in 2025 Pets of Balloon Juice Calendar B!
geg6
Every time I read about her or see/read an interview with her, I’m more impressed.
satby
What a great post AL, on the day after an important trans rights case was argued by a transgender lawyer before SCOTUS. McBride sounds like she will be an exceptional representative to her constituents and to the LGTBQ+ community. I’m glad she won.
Steve LaBonne
Motherfucking lawyer representing Tennessee admitted that when they win this case the lege will go after treatment for trans adults next. My vocabulary of obscenities is insufficient to express how much I hate these people.
Harrison Wesley
Sounds like a future president. If there’s still a country to be president of.
mrmoshpotato
Good. Fuck all this Trump trash in their fucking fascist faces.
Jeffro
MORE OF THIS PLZ DEMS!!!1!
Jeffries and the House Dems talk like this, btw: “Republicans never deliver”
Sxjames
Oh wow. For a moment there i felt…hope. strange, almost forgot what it felt like. It’s a feeling worth hanging on to.
Old School
Wow – she’s good.
I hope she has a long political career.
NaijaGal
That was a great interview! She’s truly inspiring.
cmorenc
@Steve LaBonne:
There’s at least a plausible rationale for limiting how far trans treatment can irreversibly go while a person is still a minor – not that I agree that there’s currently any significant amount of abuse of judgment and discretion by physicians and parents on the matter that justifies prohibitory restrictions. This is a made-up crisis void of any practical examples justifying the need for such laws regarding minors. Have any transitioned adults appeared before any state leg anywhere claiming to have only done so because they were pressured into it by their parents and now resent and regret having that done to them?
But what fucking interest does a legislature have with adults intent on going trans? It’s impossible to persuade any adult to undergo such consequential, irreversible physical transition who didn’t already firmly come to that conclusion on their own and have oceans of time to think about it before actually going ahead. And what business is it of yours, Billy Bob?
Steve LaBonne
@cmorenc: The idea that irreversible treatment is performed on minors is as big a lie as “post-birth abortion”. Puberty blocks are reversible. Also they prevent suicides, which are certainly irreversible.
cmorenc
@Steve LaBonne: We are on the same page about nothing irreversible is currently being done until people are adults. All I am saying is that I can at least see the plausible rationale for restricting minor transition IF there were any significant instances of minors being abusively pressured by parents or physicians, especially into any irreversible changes, but there aren’t.
Steve LaBonne
@cmorenc: I refuse to entertain hypotheticals based on blatant lies. That’s a really unnecessary concession.
Gin & Tonic
@Steve LaBonne: I’m curious to see how “irreversible surgical procedures” are defined in a way that excludes ritual removal of male penile foreskin.
Steve LaBonne
@Gin & Tonic: Religious freedom-it
isn’tis just for Christians!WTFGhost
If hope is organic, it’s not “hope,” it’s expectation. Hope is *NEVER* organic. Optimism might be – hope isn’t.
Some of you star-eyed optimists might be learning what hope is for the first time – don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean you’ve never been disappointed, but, you’ve probably never had this level of existential dread, i.e., dread for the very existence of something vitally important. And it’s a good thing – geez, if everyone was used to something like a Trump reelection, this would be an even sadder world than it is!
But, back to my point: the optimism gets lost, and a person thinks they’ve lost hope, but they never really had hope, so much as optimism.
Once things really go bad, then folks start learning about hope, and it’s a very different experience. It’s not fun, it’s not happy, and it’s one of those things no one can tell you how to do, because it’s not something you can put into words. How do you find hope? You keep searching until you do, or, until you die. What happens if you don’t find it? Duh – you die, didn’t you listen to what I just said?
Seriously: the loss of hope is called “despair” and despairing people kill themselves – keep that in mind before you describe yourself as “entirely without hope” because you can convince yourself to despair, if you try hard enough. Anyway: if you’ve been searching for hope, and wondering why it’s so hard to find, it might be that you’ve never had to look so hard for it before, so, you need to find it a different way. You may not need to look *harder* – but you might need to look *differently*.
Martin
@Gin & Tonic: Ear piercings.
WaterGirl
@Martin: @Gin & Tonic: I predict carve-outs for the things they approve of.
Like breast enhancements.
Dan B
@WaterGirl: You mean kidneys… Rrright!
As in Melania’s recent “kidney surgery”.
H.E.Wolf
I agree with you. I especially liked that she compared, and connected, present-day circumstances with historical circumstances.
JaySinWA
We should encourage the sponsors of these bills to resign in protest when they fail. Certainly they have the courage of their convictions as well as overwhelming fear of the invasion of the restrooms.
cmorenc
@WaterGirl: breast enhancements are reversible. A snarky name for breast enhancements is “bolt-ons”. To my taste, breast implants are detractive, not attractive. Unless needed as a cosmetic repair after mastectomy, i get why many women might consider that a better option than nothing.
Another Scott
McBride is very, very good. Thanks for the post.
And I wholeheartedly agree that we have to keep pushing for progress.
I’m very much reminded of a deservedly famous speech from 1968:
We may not see what’s on the other side of the mountaintop, but we need to do the work to get there, just as the people before us did the work.
Something something and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard….
Hang in there, everyone.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Arthur
I am so looking forward
kbid
This is a tough one for me. Am a 65yr old gal who while growing up wanted so much to be a boy. Not for the sexual orientation as much as heck, it was obvious guys had it easier. Was a total tomboy and played all the sports intramural — rugby (soccer was for girls back then), hardball baseball, tackle football. It was all intramural and I was a squirt playing with some big guys years older than me but that’s how we did it in the 60’s and nobody cared about gender on the field. You played and got picked for a team in the neighborhood and even elementary school was ok as long as it worked and nobody broke an arm.
Middle school became flag football and field hockey, crab soccer(!) with a bunch of girls and let me tell you there was nothing more vicious than a bunch of female tweens with hockey sticks and no shin pads.
Anyway I lost interest in the girl sports because to me it wasn’t fun anymore — crab soccer? So got into literature, history arts and loved all of that too.
My point today is I have no issue with who finds comfort where in their body but am troubled by trans women competing on gender female teams in sports, particularly at the high school, college level. That to me is an unfair advantage in such high stakes competitions as these are today. I know full well the difference between male and female for most! on the field.
it has nothing to do with bias or all the other crap thrown at trans athletes but has everything to do with everyone works so hard at their chosen sport and that playing field has got to be level. Just like in everything else we choose to be who we are — its gotta be fair. Pro football/baseball/basketball — have at it.
Sister Golden Bear
@WaterGirl:
They already are specifically exempted from the laws targeting trans kids. Cis kids are also specifically allowed to be given puberty blockers by the same laws that ban them for trans kids. I’ll also note that puberty blockers were originally developed for cis kids experiencing precious puberty. Use for trans kids came later.
Omnes Omnibus
@kbid: If this were actually a problem, you would find that trans athletes are dominating their cis competition. That isn’t happening.
Sister Golden Bear
@kbid:
I hear you in theory, but in the real world, trans athletes have been eligible compete at the Olympic and college levels* for two decades, aren’t they’re simply not dominating other women athletes. The athletic organizations have rules regulating trans women athletes — no one seems to give a shit about trans men athletes. And the people (not you) who scream about “protecting women’s sports” from trans women/girls frankly never have never cared about women’s sports before and won’t care about them once they’re successful banning trans girls/women.
Also too, elite athletes by definition are outliers. There’s been a huge controversy over an alleged trans volleyball player at San Jose State University (she’s never confirmed/denied that she’s trans). One of the arguments is she has an unfair advantage because she’s 6’1″. Someone actually looked at the roster and the team has five other players over 6′ — and one of the teams that forfeited rather than play SJSU has even more. A sports reporter actually looked at her performance stats, and she is a better player, but only relative to her team members on one of the worst teams in the league.
*There’s an estimated 400 trans women college athletes nationwide, and the first trans women athlete only qualified for the Olympics a three years — and lost in the first round. In weightlifting. There’s been a single swimmer who won a championship race — which was a slow race, her time in the 500 meters was >9 seconds off the world record.
Sister Golden Bear
As far as McBride, like a lot of other “firsts” she doesn’t really have choice except to be self-possessed, and downplay any inclination focus on trans rights. Think Jackie Robinson. I get it.
But the problem is that the haters will never extend that sort of grace back, and will seize any middle ground she offers. Which is why many trans people aren’t happy with her acquiescing on the Capitol trans bathroom ban — which affects far more than just herself. I understand why she did, and I wouldn’t want to in her shoes. But this is exactly why it’s incumbent on allies to say the things she can’t say, and fight back in ways that she can’t. AOC did a great job on this. Other Dems… not so much.
Sister Golden Bear
@Steve LaBonne: Amen.
Sister Golden Bear
@Steve LaBonne:
That’s always been their intent. Florida has already effectively banned trans healthcare for adults, including hormone treatments.
satby
@Sister Golden Bear: Right? Actual performance in the sport is all that should matter, and transgender females are not outperforming or dominating their teammates. I think the concentration on transgender females has more to do with misogyny and hostility to how they “reject” their birth assignment as male. We live in a patriarchal, rape (rapist?) and sexually abusive society.
Bupalos
Holy crap is that woman sharp. And eloquent. I honestly don’t think I’ve heard a better practical analysis of where we’re at and how we go forward.
Msb
Welcome, Ms McBride! We’re lucky to have you.