In an effort to “make America safe for ignorance and malice again,” we have the example of South Carolina U.S. Representative Nancy Mace who introduced a bill in Congress this week to ban transgender individuals from using Capitol bathrooms not associated with the person’s gender at birth. This isn’t a current issue for Congress, but will be when Sarah McBride of Delaware takes their seat in January.
Mace’s claim is that the presence of biological males in the bathroom will render it unsafe and less private for biological females. I understand that no one wants to feel threatened, exposed, or ogled in a public bathroom. But banning a single transgender woman from using a Capitol bathroom exposes something much more malicious and outright cruel.
This is where ignorance, borne of prejudice, meets malice in Mace’s proposed bathroom ban. I think at least two factors come into play when trying to understand and oppose Mace’s legislation. One factor is the completely mistaken assumption that transgender people change genders out of a prurient desire to invade the spaces of biological females. That’s several steps past utter nonsense. I’m pretty certain that no biological male would make the incredibly arduous physical, emotional and spiritual journey of gender transition so that he could hang out in public ladies’ rooms hoping to catch a glimpse. But this is the narrow-minded and malicious view of Nancy Mace and her ilk. Her thinking seems to be this: If we can claim (falsely) that a person is acting out of some deviant sexual interest or instinct, we can vilify and discriminate against them all we want. It’s a claim right out of an old and seriously outdated playbook.
Another factor is the hypocrisy of Nancy Mace and her specious claim that she’s protecting the dignity of biological women by seeking to ban transgender people from Capitol bathrooms. Nancy Mace? Protector of women? I don’t think so. Is she intentionally blind to the sexual rapaciousness of several of the men nominated by Donald Trump (speaking of sexual rapaciousness!) to serve as members of the Cabinet? Why is she unwilling to acknowledge that these heterosexual men have lengthy histories of sexual aggressiveness toward women and that’s both wrong and potentially criminal. Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth may be the examples du jour, but they’re just the beginning of the dark, Trump-led parade of miscreants. Nancy Mace might gain a little traction with women were she to step out of line and stand against men who objectify and demean women.
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