Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., is making waves after introducing a resolution explicitly targeting her transgender colleague, Rep.-elect Sarah McBride, D-Del., that would bar McBride and other transgender women who work in the Capitol from accessing women’s restrooms or other gender-based facilities.
House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday announced his support for the resolution in a statement: “All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings — such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms — are reserved for individuals of that biological sex,” adding, “Women deserve women’s only spaces.”
Shortly after she took office, Mace framed herself as a pro-LGBT, social moderate.
I, for one, am surprised to see Mace launching this culture war crusade, because when I interviewed her in 2021, shortly after she took office, she framed herself as a pro-LGBT, social moderate.
“I strongly support LGBTQ rights and equality,” Mace told me at the time. “No one should be discriminated against.”
“I have friends and family that identify as LGBTQ,” she explained. “Understanding how they feel and how they’ve been treated is important. Having been around gay, lesbian, and transgender people has informed my opinion over my lifetime.”
Times have changed, and, evidently, Mace has, too.
To be fair, the congresswoman hasn’t entirely abandoned support for LGBT rights, as she broke with the majority of the Republican Party in 2022 to support the Respect for Marriage Act, which enshrined same-sex marriage protections into federal law. Still, the stance she’s taking now seems entirely devoid of the kind of nuance and empathy Mace originally branded herself around.
“Just because a Congressman wants to wear a mini skirt doesn’t mean he can come into a women’s bathroom,” Mace wrote in a social media post about the resolution, referring to McBride, needlessly insulting her colleague and personalizing the debate. “There is nothing the Radical Left can do to stop me from protecting women and girls.”
But “protecting women and girls” is not what Mace is actually doing, and it’s not just the “Radical Left” that disagrees with her stand: Many moderate right-of-center Americans like myself also find her grandstanding disappointing, because there’s no actual “safety” issue being addressed here.
Assaults by transgender women in women’s bathrooms are incredibly, incredibly rare, and there is zero reason to specifically believe that McBride is going to assault anyone in a restroom. What’s more, any criminal who would enter a women’s restroom intending to assault or harass a woman is clearly already undeterred by policies or laws. (This is the exact point Republicans themselves often make about signs designating certain areas as “gun-free zones.”) And in practice, women’s restrooms are filled with private, individual stalls, so the most that could happen here is encountering a trans woman at the sink next to you.
To be fair, situations involving locker rooms or changing spaces are more complicated, and it’s entirely understandable that many women wouldn’t want to share those spaces with people who retain some male anatomy. But lumping those more legitimate concerns in with washing your hands next to someone who happens to be trans destroys our ability to have a nuanced conversation about these tricky questions.
Ironically, Mace's resolution would lead to a perverse situation where transgender men who work in Congress — would be forced to use the women’s restroom.
Mace claims she’s receiving death threats, which are unacceptable and should be investigated by law enforcement. But such behavior is not representative of the entire LGBT community any more than individual QAnon extremists are representative of all Republicans — and doesn't change the reality of this situation.
Mace justifies her resolution, in part, by arguing that these restrictions are needed for women to remain comfortable in their shared spaces. But, ironically, her resolution would lead to a perverse situation where transgender men who work in Congress — who may have beards and large muscles and outwardly appear indistinguishable from other men — would be forced to use the women’s restroom.
Wouldn’t that make women much more uncomfortable?
This entire crusade is a solution in search of a problem. Whether Mace realizes it or not, she has likely shared the women’s bathroom with transgender women who work for Democratic members of Congress many times without any issue. And anyone who has traveled internationally — or even been to some of the swankiest restaurants in Washington, D.C. — has likely used unisex bathrooms with stalls and lived to tell the tale.
Mace openly admits that this is directly targeted at McBride, answering a reporter’s question by saying, “Yes, and absolutely, and then some. Someone with a penis in the women’s locker room — that’s not OK. I’m a victim of abuse myself. I’m a rape survivor.”
While Mace’s past trauma is tragic and worthy of our sympathy, her logic here still doesn’t follow. She has no idea what genitalia McBride has, as some transgender women choose to have “bottom surgery” that removes their penises and some do not. And genitalia does not ever need to be exposed in a women’s bathroom that’s exclusively composed of individual stalls, which is the central focus of the congresswoman’s efforts — at least, in theory.
Nancy Mace’s stand does seem to be succeeding in its real goal: bringing widespread attention to Nancy Mace. After all, this is the same congresswoman who dramatically wore a shirt branded with a scarlet letter to work because people were criticizing her for voting to oust then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
From a public relations perspective, this might all work out for Mace, who is seeking to court a new base of support after her district was redrawn and now skews more conservative than when she was first elected. But if the congresswoman’s antics ultimately succeed, it will only lead to more unnecessary antagonism, increased hostility and more dysfunction in the already-broken halls of Washington, D.C.