Nancy Mace takes aim at incoming trans lawmaker with bathroom rule

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Not a year ago, Rep. Nancy Mace her place in the committee meeting room and peppery a friendly witness with questions she already knew the answers to.

“Does the color of your skin matter when you’re in the trenches, when you’re in battle?” the Republican lawmaker asked a Space Force commander who it was fired after public claims Marxist ideologies were widespread in the military.

“Does sexual orientation matter if you’re wearing a uniform?” continued Mace, the first woman to graduate from The Citadel, a military college in her home state of South Carolina.

“I don’t think anyone thinks that having people of diverse backgrounds in the military is a bad thing,” Mace said. “I think everyone in the country would welcome diversity, no matter what industry they’re in.”

The question would have been unexpected from most Republicans in Congress, but less so from Mace — one of the few from her party who has made comments in support of gay marriage and “transgender equality.”

Yet Mace’s embrace of diversity, it seems, stops at her own workplace. In one of the most transparent displays of anti-transgender trolling seen in some time in Congress—and that’s saying something—Mace would like change chamber rules to ensure she can police who can use the restrooms near hers. Inclusion, it seems, is for other people, as long as it doesn’t interfere with Charmin’s ration.

Given a chance to throw fuel on a culture war fire, Mace announced Monday night that she planned to introduce a resolution banning transgender women from using the ladies’ room on the House side of the U.S. Capitol. Mace who has told how she was raped at age 16 framed the issue as one grounded in personal safety in a vulnerable space.

But here’s the kicker: the effort comes just weeks before the House is set to welcome Delaware’s Sarah McBride as the first openly transgender member of Congress. The 34-year-old former White House aide was well aware that her choice could lead to someone like Mace making an example of her, a prospect she spoke candidly about during an interview with TIME’s Nik Popli before the election .

“Their immaturity is not worthy of being worthy of an answer. My focus will be to get the job done,” McBride said last month. “Are there going to be some members of Congress who are going to be weird and immature that I’m there? Sure, but these are members of Congress who won’t work with any Democrat, and they can hardly work with their own Republican colleagues .”

McBride won her place in deep blue Delaware with 16 points. But on her way to victory, she expected such sideshows and doesn’t intend for them to distract her from working on the issues that keep Americans up at night.

“I didn’t run to make history. I didn’t run to be the first,” McBride told Popli. “I’m running to be the best damn legislator I can be.”

On Tuesday, Mace was unwavering in his decision to keep McBride out of the Capitol’s women’s restrooms.

“If being a feminist makes me an extremist, I’m all for it,” Mace told journalists. “I will absolutely, 100% stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women’s room, in our locker room, in our locker room. I will be there every step of the way.”

To be clear: There is no empirical evidence that it increases the risk of sexual assault if trans people use a bathroom of their own choosing. In the rare cases where assaults take place in restrooms, the academic evidence says it is unrelated to public accommodation laws.

Asked directly if her decision was aimed at McBride, there was no pause.

“Yes, and absolutely, and so little,” said Mace, who said that this should be a first step towards one national ban about allowing visitors to any facility that receives federal dollars to choose which bathroom they use.

Others, including Mace’s longtime rival Marjorie Taylor Greene, piled on. In a private session, Greene — a former CrossFit gym owner — said she wanted to physically scrap with any trans woman trying to use the same facility as her.

“It’s pretty aggressive for biological males to invade our space,” Greene said after the session. Greene, a Republican from Georgia who in 2021 submitted an anti-trans sign in her office facing a colleague with a trans child also said McBride categorically should be prohibited from all public restrooms in the Capitol complex, saying McBride should only use the private toilet in his office. (Greene also insisted on calling McBride by male pronouns, a sign of the latent contempt McBride is subjected to at the Capitol even before he was sworn in.)

This may be the first time the pair have aligned with anything beyond their mutual disdain. (“All I can say about Marjorie Taylor Greene is bless her f—ing heart,” Mace said after being called to the then-Speaker’s office for an interview with in 2021 about the Greene spat.)

Faced with a narrow majority and an urgent pile of must-do tasks from the incoming Trump administration, House Speaker Mike Johnson is expected to include some form of Mace’s resolution in the package of rules governing his side of the hill next year. After signaling he would back her goal, Johnson – who in the lead a national “Don’t Say Gay” bill and has been transparent hostile to LGBTQ rights — seemed to be trying to have it both ways.

“I’m not going to engage in this. We don’t look down on anybody. We treat everybody with dignity,” Johnson said Tuesday at his weekly news conference. “We will provide appropriate housing for every member of Congress.”

A few hours later, he asked reporters back for a follow-up chat that didn’t exactly make things any clearer. “A man is a man and a woman is a woman. A man cannot become a woman,” Johnson said, before adding an incoherent addendum: “But I also believe that we treat everyone with dignity. We can believe all those things at the same time.”

Do you have it? All perspectives were sure to find something to like in that collection of words. The problem is that it is not politics.

The trans issues were among the most popular attacks in the fall election, with more than $200 million in anti-trans ads running nationwide. According to to the tracking company AdImpact, Trump used more on anti-trans ads than any other issue, sensing that the small portion of the electorate could be a proxy for all other elements of anxiety that present themselves to the electorate. While the bet dominated the airwaves at many battlegrounds, it didn’t actually move the needle terribly, studies showed. Yet the Republicans looked at the scoreboard, saw the W and decided to keep hammering this population.

Nationally, it seems that the fervor behind so-called Bathroom Bills has stuck outafter a rash of such prohibitions i 14 states. This yearjust Mississippi and Utah passed measures expressly targeting trans neighbors, and Virginia’s seems stuck in committee, while Texas never really got off the ground. Other efforts in Iowa, Mississippi, Oregon, South Carolina, West Virginia and Utah failed. Mace’s stunt could help reignite that effort.

McBride, who didn’t take questions as she walked into her new office building Tuesday, seemed to know this kind of circus was coming during her campaign.

“I did not run to be a spokesman for a movement. I ran to be the voice of every Delawarean in the United States House of Representatives,” she told TIME shortly before winning the seat. “I’m not there to work on an issue, and I’m not there to speak out every time someone says something outrageous, or to put out a press release or a tweet every time there’s an ugly bill, because at the end of the day of the day that will distract me, that will distract me from the job I’m there to do, which is to pass legislation on all the issues.”

Crazy who flushes where seems to have taken up some Republicans’ full attention this week. That doesn’t necessarily bode well for where the 119th Congress will go from here. But it also fits neatly into how McBride prepared for his return to DC “We need the House of Representatives to be focused on the real issues that keep people up at night, not the issues that we’ve seen the caucus that currently the focus of the US House of Representatives,” she said. the day.”

Maybe not, but a series of bad incentives allowed it to carry this one.

With reporting by Nik Popli.

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