I realize that South Carolina Republican U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace is an attention-hungry partisan, trying to make a name for herself as a culture warrior by demonizing the first transgender woman to be elected to Congress.
And I understand that giving Mace’s proposal to ban transgender women from women’s bathrooms in the Capitol any oxygen is probably just what she wants.
But I also don’t think it’s wise to allow her fear-mongering and demonizing to go unanswered.
Earlier this month, voters in the state of Delaware did something momentous: They elected Democrat Sarah McBride, a transgender woman, to the House of Representatives. At 34, McBride, a member of the Delaware state Senate since 2021 and a former spokesperson for the national Human Rights Campaign, will be one of the youngest members in Congress. Focusing on healthcare, reproductive rights and economic issues, she beat her Republican opponent by a hefty 16 percentage points.
Since then, Mace and her colleague Georgia Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have been waging a petty war against McBride, aided and abetted by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who announced Wednesday that transgender people in the Capitol and House office buildings will be allowed to use only those bathrooms that correspond to the gender they were assigned at birth.
Also on Wednesday, Mace introduced a resolution that would ban trans women from using women’s bathrooms and locker rooms in federal buildings. Never mind that trans women have been using women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill and in the White House and Pentagon for years without issues, according to writer and trans activist Charlotte Clymer.
“I have PTSD from the sexual abuse I have suffered at the hands of a man,” Mace told Scripps News. “And I will tell you just the idea of a man in a locker room watching me change clothes after a workout is a huge trigger and it’s not OK to make and force women to be vulnerable in private spaces.”
Of course, we all want to be safe in private and public spaces.
“But the logic and coherence there is somewhat lacking,” said Andrew Flores, an associate professor of government at American University. “According to the data analysis, there is not a systematic relationship between allowing trans people to use bathrooms according to their current gender and experiences of predation. The correlation is just not there.”
In 2018, Flores, who is also a distinguished visiting scholar at UCLA Law’s Williams Institute, and his colleagues studied crime rates before and after cities in Massachusetts outlawed gender discrimination in public accommodations, i.e. bathrooms and locker rooms. They compared the rates in those cities with Massachusetts cities that had passed no such protections.
“We found nothing,” he told me — no change in victimization rates for a crime that is already vanishingly rare. “At the end of the day, we were surprised by how many agencies had such trouble producing data for us because they couldn’t find it.”
A 2017 survey by CNN found similar results when it reached out to 20 law enforcement agencies in states with anti-discrimination policies covering gender identity. “None who answered reported any bathroom assaults after the policies took effect,” the network reported.
To assume that a trans woman is a sexual predator is not just outrageous and wrong, it’s the same sort of thinking that conflates homosexuality with pedophilia. Most child sex offenders identify as heterosexual or bisexual men.
Anyway, I don’t know what’s more perverse — the fixation some Republican women have on being watched in bathrooms and locker rooms, or the way they readily stand by their male colleagues in the GOP, even if they are found liable for sexually assaulting a woman in a department store dressing room and boast about grabbing women’s genitals, allegedly have sex with underage teenagers or pay settlements to women who have accused them of rape.
On Tuesday, Politico reported that in a private House GOP conference meeting, Greene “indicated that she’d fight a transgender woman if she tried to use a woman’s bathroom on the House side of the Capitol.”
This possibility certainly tracks with reality. As many people can guess, and research shows, transgender people are far more likely than cisgender people to be assaulted in public spaces as a result of their gender identity.
Still, those facts did not stop Greene from telling reporters last week that “America is fed up with the trans ideology being shoved into our face. Women have been the victims of this garbage for long enough.”
I would suggest that Greene and Mace are shoving “transgender ideology” into their own faces.
As McBride herself put it in a social media post, “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families. … Each of us were sent here because voters saw something in us that they value.”
And of course, Mace’s mean-spirited proposal has apparently caused a backlash. “Men that want to use women’s restrooms are threatening to kill me over this issue,” she told the cable network NewsNation.
Now she can pose as a martyr. The skeptic in me thinks she was hoping for that all along.
Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Threads: @rabcarian