Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina (left); Rep.-elect Sarah McBride of Delaware Credit – Getty Images (2)
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Not one year ago, Rep. Nancy Mace took her seat in the committee meeting room and peppered a friendly witness with questions she already knew the answers to.
“Does the color of your skin matter when you are in the trenches, when you are in combat?” the Republican lawmaker asked a Space Force commanding officer who was fired after publicly claiming Marxist ideologies were widespread in the military.
“Does sexual orientation matter if you are wearing a uniform?” continued Mace, the first woman to graduate from The Citadel, a military college in her home state of South Carolina.
“I do not think anyone believes having people from diverse backgrounds in the military is a bad thing,” Mace said. “I think everybody in the country would welcome diversity, no matter what industry they are in.”
The line of questioning would have been unexpected from most Republicans in Congress, but less so from Mace—one of the few from her party to have made comments in support of gay marriage and “transgender equality.”
Yet Mace’s embrace of diversity, it seems, stops at her own workplace. In one of the most transparent displays of anti-transgender trolling seen in some time in Congress—and that’s saying something—Mace wants to change the chamber’s rules to make sure she can police who can use the toilets near hers. Inclusion, it seems, is something for other people so long as it does not encroach on the ration of Charmin.
Given a chance to toss fuel on a culture war fire, Mace announced Monday evening that she planned to introduce a resolution banning transgender women from using the ladies’ rooms on the House side of the U.S. Capitol. Mace, who has recounted how she was raped at age 16, framed the issue as one grounded in personal safety in a vulnerable space.
But here’s the rub: the effort comes just weeks before the House is set to welcome Delaware’s Sarah McBride as the first openly transgender member of Congress. The 34-year-old former White House aide was well aware that her election might lead to someone like Mace making an example out of her, a prospect she spoke about candidly during a pre-Election Day interview with TIME’s Nik Popli.
“Their immaturity is not worthy of being dignified with a response. My focus is going to be doing the work,” McBride said last month. “Are there going to be some members of Congress who are going to be weird and immature about me being there? Sure, but those are members of Congress that won’t work with any Democrat and they can barely work with their own Republican colleagues.”
McBride won her seat in deep-blue Delaware by 16 points. But on the way toward victory, she anticipated such sideshows, and doesn’t intend them to distract her from working on the issues that keep Americans up at night.
“I didn’t run to make history. I didn’t run to be a first,” McBride told Popli. “I’m running to be the best damn legislator that I can be.”
On Tuesday, Mace was unflinching in her resolve to keep McBride out of the Capitol’s women’s restrooms.
“If being a feminist makes me an extremist, I’m totally here for it,” Mace told reporters. “I’m absolutely, 100% going to stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women’s restroom, in our locker rooms, in our changing rooms. I will be there every step of the way.”
To be clear: there is no empirical evidence that allowing trans individuals to use a bathroom of their choosing increases the risk of sexual assault. In rare instances where assaults take place in restrooms, the academic evidence says it is unrelated to public accommodation laws.
Asked directly if her resolution was aimed at McBride, there was zero pause.
“Yes, and absolutely, and then some,” said Mace, who said this should be a first step toward a national ban on allowing visitors to any facility that gets federal dollars to pick which bathroom they use.
Others, including Mace’s long-standing rival Marjorie Taylor Greene, piled on. In a private session, Greene—a former CrossFit gym owner—said she would physically scrap with any trans woman trying to use the same facility as her.
“It’s pretty aggressive for biological men to be invading our spaces,” Greene said after the session. Greene, a Georgia Republican who in 2021 posted an anti-trans sign at her office facing a colleague with a trans child, also said McBride should be categorically banned from all public restrooms in the Capitol complex, saying McBride should use solely the private restroom in her office. (Greene also insisted on calling McBride by male pronouns, a sign of the latent contempt McBride is facing at the Capitol even before being sworn in.).
It may be the first time the pair has aligned on anything beyond their mutual contempt. (“All I can say about Marjorie Taylor Greene is bless her f—ing heart,” Mace said after being called to the then-Speaker’s office for a talking-to in 2021 about the Greene spat.)
Facing a narrow majority and a pressing pile of must-do tasks from the incoming Trump Administration, House Speaker Mike Johnson is expected to include some form of Mace’s resolution in the rules package governing his side of the Hill next year. After signaling he would back her measure, Johnson—who spearheaded a national “Don’t Say Gay” bill and has been transparently hostile to LGBTQ rights—seemed to try to have it both ways.
“I’m not going to engage in this. We don’t look down upon anyone. We treat everybody with dignity,” Johnson said Tuesday at his weekly press conference. “We’ll provide appropriate accommodation for every member of Congress.”
A few hours later, he asked reporters back for a follow-up chat that didn’t exactly make things clearer. “A man is a man and a woman is a woman. A man cannot become a woman,” Johnson said, before adding a disjointed addendum: “But I also believe that we treat everybody with dignity. We can believe all those things at the same time.”
Got that? All perspectives surely found something they liked in that assemblage of words. The problem is that this is not policy.
The trans issues were among the most popular attacks in the elections this fall, with more than $200 million in anti-trans ads running nationwide. According to tracking firm AdImpact, Trump spent more on anti-trans ads than any other topic, sensing that the tiny slice of the electorate could be a proxy for all other elements of anxiety presenting themselves to voters. While the effort dominated the airwaves in many battlegrounds, it actually didn’t move the needle terribly, surveys found. Still, Republicans looked at the scoreboard, saw the W, and decided to keep hammering this population.
Nationally, the fervor behind so-called Bathroom Bills seem to have petered out, after a rash of such bans in 14 states. This year, just Mississippi and Utah passed into law measures explicitly targeting trans neighbors, and Virginia’s seems to be stuck in committee while Texas’ never really got rolling. Other efforts in Iowa, Mississippi, Oregon, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Utah failed. Mace’s stunt could help stir up that effort once again.
McBride, who didn’t take questions when she walked into her new office building on Tuesday, seemed to know this sort of circus was coming during her campaign.
“I didn’t run to be a spokesperson for a movement. I ran to be the voice of every Delawarean in the United States House of Representatives,” she told TIME shortly before she won the seat. “I am not there to work on one issue, and I’m not there to speak out every single time someone says something outrageous, or to issue a press release or a tweet every single time there’s a nasty bill, because at the end of the day, that will distract me, that would distract me from the job that I am there to do, which is to pass legislation on all of the issues.”
Maddeningly, who flushes where seems to have consumed the whole of some Republicans’ attention this week. It does not necessarily bode well for where the 119th Congress will go from here. But it also fits tidily into how McBride braced for her return to D.C. “We need the House of Representatives to be focused on the real issues that are keeping people up at night, not the issues that we’ve seen the caucus of chaos that currently governs the U.S. House of Representatives focus on,” she said. “It’s a small number of politicians and activists who are taking their own insecurities and their own desperation and turning it into a political tactic, and I don’t think it actually carries the day.”
Maybe not, but a series of bad incentives allowed it to carry this one.
With reporting by Nik Popli.
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Write to Philip Elliott at philip.elliott@time.com.
