Nancy Mace Is Already Harassing Her New Co-Worker With Transphobia – Mother Jones

Nancy Mace’s newest stunt? Attempting to bar Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.) from the ladies’s rest room within the Home of Representatives.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Name/ZUMA

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) has confirmed time and time once more that she’s going to do practically something to make headlines.

However on Monday, she reached a brand new low, introducing a decision looking for to bar transgender members and staff within the Home of Representatives from utilizing the bogs that correspond to their gender identification within the Capitol constructing. Echoing Republican speaking factors grounded in paranoia, the decision alleges that permitting trans girls to make use of girls’s bogs “jeopardizes the security and dignity” of cisgender girls. It might job the Home Sergeant-at-Arms with imposing the decision if handed.

The transfer comes simply weeks after Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.) grew to become the primary overtly transgender particular person to serve in Congress. Although it doesn’t instantly point out McBride, the invoice represents a transparent try and assault her: Mace instructed reporters this explicitly on Tuesday, confirming that the invoice is “completely” meant to focus on McBride. And in a publish on X after saying the decision, Mace mentioned McBride “doesn’t get a say in girls’s non-public areas.”

McBride appeared to reply to the decision in a publish on X, stating: “On daily basis Individuals go to work with individuals who have life journeys completely different than their very own and interact with them respectfully, I hope members of Congress can muster that very same kindness.” In a follow-up publish, McBride known as Mace’s effort “a blatant try from far right-wing extremists to distract from the truth that they don’t have any actual options to what Individuals are going through. We ought to be centered on bringing down the price of housing, well being care, and youngster care, not manufacturing tradition wars.”

Different Democratic members additionally blasted the trouble: Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.), the primary overtly homosexual particular person to signify her state in Congress and co-chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, mentioned in a publish on X that Mace’s effort was a “petty, hateful distraction,” including, “There’s no backside to the cruelty.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio (D-N.Y.) mentioned: “This isn’t simply bigotry, that is simply plain bullying.” Laurel Powell, spokesperson for the Human Rights Marketing campaign, known as Mace’s decision “a political charade by a grown-up bully” and “one other warning signal that the incoming anti-equality Home majority will proceed to deal with concentrating on LGBTQ+ folks fairly than the price of residing, worth gouging or any of the issues the American folks elected them to unravel.” And GLAAD CEO Sarah Ellis mentioned in a press release: “Everybody in Congress would possibly attempt specializing in options to enhance folks’s lives and main with kindness, and see what progress you would possibly make for each American.”

“Manufacturing tradition wars,” as McBride put it, is, certainly, an apt technique to describe the transphobic paranoia Mace and supporting members within the GOP seems to be stoking with this decision—an particularly ironic growth provided that Democrats have been chastised for having been too involved with trans points since dropping the election.

On the subject of GOP panic about trans folks utilizing bogs alongside cisgender folks, the proof across the challenge doesn’t assist the panic. A 2018 examine printed within the journal Sexual Analysis and Social Coverage discovered there isn’t a hyperlink between trans-inclusive rest room insurance policies and security, and that stories of “privateness and security violations” in bogs, altering rooms, and locker rooms are “exceedingly uncommon.” That is most likely why most states—37, plus DC—don’t have any legal guidelines on the books regulating trans peoples’ use of bogs or different amenities, in keeping with the Motion Development Venture. (Mace’s workplace didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon that analysis or different questions for this story.) However these details haven’t stopped the GOP from pumping thousands and thousands of {dollars} into anti-trans adverts and submitting a whole bunch of anti-trans payments in state legislatures throughout the nation.

And as for the declare that it’s trans individuals who pose a hazard to cisgender folks in bogs? The GOP seems to be the occasion who poses a bodily risk. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went as far as to reportedly say in a non-public Home GOP Convention assembly that she would struggle a transgender girl if she tried to make use of a girls’s rest room within the Home.

For all of the drama that is stirring up, although, Mace’s newest effort could not go any additional than the headlines: At a press convention Tuesday, Home Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) mentioned, “This is a matter that Congress has by no means needed to handle earlier than and we’re going to do this in a deliberate trend…and we are going to accommodate the wants of each single particular person.” He added that he wouldn’t decide to together with the language of Mace’s decision within the guidelines package deal the Home will vote on in early January. A spokesperson for Johnson didn’t instantly reply to a query concerning the penalties if Greene fought one other member of Congress or the shortage of proof to assist Mace’s decision.

Replace, November 19: This publish was up to date with a press release from GLAAD.