Montana, a solid Red State in the Mid West that voted for Trump, has a House of Representatives with 150 members (of which just two are trans/non binary). They meet no more than ninety days every other year, a schedule designed to accommodate their other, full-time jobs. Its a Republican stronghold and they have been using their super-majority to pushing bills that criminalized the distribution of “obscene materials” by public-school employees, prohibited drag shows in public libraries and schools, and exempted public-school students from having to call classmates by their preferred names or pronouns. They sound like a charming bunch to us, BUT the really worrying aspect is that they would rather spend their limited time making life hell fot the LGBTQ+ community than deal with the economic needs and everyday demands of all their constituents.
They have a particularly nasty Bill that sought to bar medical providers from treating trans minors with hormones or gender-affirming surgeries, which some Republicans referred to as “amputation.” “I wouldn’t call that health care,” the House speaker, Matt Regier, whose sister and father were also members of the legislature. At the start of the session, the Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, had preëmptively requested 2.6 million dollars to cover the expected cost of defending the state against lawsuits by civil-liberties groups.
Then they took to debating the names-and-pronouns bill. Zooey Zephyr, a Democrat and a trans woman representing Missoula, and one of two trans or nonbinary members of the House, called it “inherently discriminatory” and tantamount to bullying. In the following weeks, she continued to speak during floor debate, rising from her seat, No. 31, with increasing fervor. When, in April, the legislature took up Senate Bill 99, the one concerning medical care for trans minors, Zephyr said to its proponents, “If you vote yes on this bill, and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.” She quickly became a national symbol of L.G.B.T.Q. resistance.
House members then voted to bar Zephyr from the chamber for the remainder of the legislative session. It was the latest in a string of incidents involving Republican-controlled legislatures muzzling elected Democratic colleagues. Trans filmmaker Kimberley Reed, originally from Montana, turned up to make a short documentary Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr about Zephyr’s journey through the final weeks of the 2023 legislative session
Its not a happy tale as S.B. 99 gets passed, and Zephyr is forced to finish out the session from a bench next to the tiny statehouse snack bar. When the session concludes, she clears out the seat she was barred from and chats cordially with a few fellow-legislators. A sweet, personal moment arrives soon afterward, when Zephyr and her long-distance girlfriend, the trans journalist Erin Reed, take the stage at Missoula’s Queer Prom.
Its people like Zephyr who makes us so proud to be part of our community as she strives for a better life for us all. I know that most of us would lack her selflessness and her determination not to be browbeaten by such narrow-minded bigots.
Zephyr is running for reëlection this fall, as is the Democrat SJ Howell, who represents a neighboring district in Missoula and identifies as trans and nonbinary. The two are minorities within a super-minority—but they’ll likely be back at the statehouse in 2025.
