Zooey Zephyr, Montana’s first, and only, transgender state
Congressperson—who was recently reelected to office—on The Felon’s Little
Johnson announcing a ban against transgender people using the bathrooms in
Congress:
“One of the things that you don't have control over is the
extent of the cruelty, the lengths to which someone will go—particularly those
in positions of power—to try to hurt and exclude. For me, the work was to
reveal that cruelty for what it was, and not allow it to take away the things
that I did have control over: love for myself, love for my partner, and care
for the well-being of my community. The joy that you are holding onto is worth
fighting for, and if you are a trans youth right now, hold on to your joy and
hold on to the folks that you are trying to make the world a better place for …
Our job as a community is to make sure to know when individually we need to
unplug and care for ourselves. We've seen only a handful of Dems who have stood
up and allied themselves with anti-trans legislation, and almost without fail,
those Dems are gone. You cannot throw a community under the bus and at the same
time say that you stand for them … [and also] say, ‘Well, we will accept
discrimination in certain areas. We will accept that we are lesser in these
spaces.’ There is no asterisk on trans people that you can put on us that we
will deem an acceptable form of discrimination. With the slew of anti-trans
legislation coming, trans people are going to look to Congresswoman McBride
[who won Delaware’s only House seat making her the first openly transgender person in the US Congress] and say, ‘Where is she
drawing the lines of accepted discrimination? What is she willing to fight
for?’ And I recognize the unfairness of that having faced an echo of that in
Montana. I think she will have to contend with, as many firsts have to, not
just the burden of trying to be an effective legislator, but of trying to be a
beacon for a community who feels alone, scared, and on the precipice of being
abandoned. It is resoundingly important that we plant the flag of joy, of our
own personal joy, and that we do not let these efforts to erase and exclude
stop us from making decisions that give our lives meaning. As trans people, we
are no stranger to the way in which we come alive when we get to be ourselves.
And in the same vein, we must chase the things that are full of love and that
bring our hearts joy. And that's the work. And it feels weird to say that that
is the work, but that is as radical as any piece of legislation we could
bring.”
It's a bathroom and people like Little Mike Johnson and
Nancy Mace spend too much time worried about what happens in bathrooms and yet
don’t give a flying f**k about what goes on in schools with guns or children
who go hungry or women who are assaulted by men their party put in power.
It’s not about bathrooms, it never was; it’s about fear and
control.
photo |