The Sarah McBride Bathroom Bill Bullshit
On attention addiction, single-sex spaces, and discrimination.
Nancy Mace — representative of South Carolina — was a victim of rape at just sixteen years old. In 2019, when she was a congresswoman in the South Carolina Legislature, that house was considering passing a sweeping, comprehensive anti-abortion bill, without exception for rape and incest. In a brave and personal manner, Mace spoke in favor of the exception, buoyed by her past, and her moving testimony persuaded her colleagues.
Many gender-skeptical feminists — in Britain and the US — became impassioned from experiences like this, wanting to make sure women are safe in domestic abuse shelters, changing rooms, and, yes, bathrooms. Many of these activists get very unfairly attacked and smeared by those to the left, branded as "TERFS," but their points are fair, necessary, and usually made without cruelty and unkindness towards trans people.
It's worth remembering, however, that it wasn't feminists who sparked the bathroom bill controversies under the Obama presidency. They were conservatives wrangling for culture-war attention over a non-issue, and they got it. The modern trans issue has turned into this too, with the minority of feminist voices largely drowned out by Trumpian loudmouths, who have done nothing for the issue other than use it to increase their Twitter following. If you've heard of Matt Waltz but not Julie Bindel or Kathleen Stock, you've proven my point.
And some of those Trumpian loudmouths are themselves women.
Enter stage right, Nancy Mace: a once-promising conservative politician who has transmogrified into the most craven of attention addicts, alongside Matt Gaetz and former congressman Madison Cawthorn. Her Congressional staffers are functionally media bookers, who focus above all else on getting their client in front of a camera. Last year, in The Daily Beast, Jake Lahut reported that her internal handbook explicitly demanded that she be booked for at least 1-3 national TV appearances per day; and her former employers don’t refute this image. Former Mace staffer, Natalie Johnson, responded to the news cycle about the McBridge bill, saying “If you think this bill is about protecting women and not simply a ploy to get on Fox News, you've been fooled,” and that:
“Tweeting 262 times about a bill that applies to like .00000001% of Congress in 36 hours is definitely about protecting women. It’s certainly not just a ploy for media attention.”
(Johnson also posted that she didn’t want to see Mace’s “botched, cheap hooker-inspired boob job on my television”)
Mace was this way when she was anti-Trump, begging her staff to get punched in the face on January 6th; just as she was when she pitched herself to the mainstream press as a Republican who "stood up" to her party. She is even more so now as a pro-Trump Republican, voting down McCarthy so that she could get yet more airtime and clicks; and now again as she targets an incoming colleague with a bathroom bill.
Congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride made news as the first transgender person elected to the House, so Mace saw a way to make some news for herself. (McBride didn’t take the bait to get into a fight, and issued a short, professional statement saying that she’s not going to “fight about bathrooms,” in the press or House, and focus on the issues her constituents care about).
Without relitigating the already over-litigated topic of bathroom bills, it's worth noting that trans people are more often the victim of sexual assault than perpetrators (in totals and per capita); that violent perverts don't follow official guidance about bathroom etiquette; but also that, understandably, many women do not want to have biological males in a fundamentally vulnerable, exposed space.
The broad consensus on this issue, then, is the common sense one. School changing rooms should be sex-segregated; bathrooms at professional workplaces largely shouldn't be, as gender separation is fine; and these decisions should be left to individual companies and local authorities, not state and federal governments. Diversity is to the benefit of everyone, and just as there ought to be female-only women's shelters, there should also be women's shelters that take in trans women. I'm guilty of a version of what Matt Yglesias coined the "pundit bias" — "that belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively.” — but I don't think this is far off.
So, where do Congressional bathroom bills come into this discussion? Nowhere. This a massive crock of attention-seeking horseshit. There have been no complaints before, despite their being trans staffers on the Hill. There's nothing solved by this, other than making it more inconvenient and uncomfortable for those staffers; and McBride has said that she had no intention of using the general bathrooms anyway (not that a congresswoman’s choice of bathroom should really be of public record).
Mace and her colleagues don't give a damn about this topic. In 2016, Presidential candidate Donald Trump was asked if Caitlyn Jenner could use the women's bathroom at Trump Tower, and he said yes. Because, of course, she could; it's such a reasonable answer that even a profoundly unreasonable man couldn't deny it. And if the now MAGA-trumpeting Jenner visits Congress, there's no way she's going to use the men's bathroom. And if Mace was seriously concerned about trans women entering women's bathrooms, and supported this view on her own personal experiences, then she wouldn't have told the Washington Examiner in 2021 (and repeated on Twitter), that "I strongly support LGBTQ rights and equality. No one should be discriminated against."
Or to look at this issue another way: if Nancy Mace wanted to get attention, show she had a spine, and legitimately stand up for women, she'd be have call for the release of the Ethics Report on the conduct of Matt Gaetz. As my Fox New appearing, Spectator colleague, Ben Domenech, wrote in his viral essay:
“Matt Gaetz is a sex trafficking drug addicted piece of shit. He is abhorrent. ... Every Republican in Washington has an opinion about Matt Gaetz, and 99 percent of those opinions are “Keep Matt Gaetz away from my wife/daughter/friend and anyone I care about.” He is a walking genital, warts included as a bonus. If I was merely attempting to count the number of women I know who have had bad experiences with Matt Gaetz, I would run out of fingers and toes.”
Denouncing Gaetz was an open goal; but no. In fact, she stood side-by-side with him as they drummed up attention with the McCarthy leadership vote drama, and never distanced herself from him since.
Perhaps you could say that Gaetz hasn’t been charged with anything, and if that was your lower bar, then she could at least have said that men found by a jury to have committed sexual assault shouldn’t be allowed near public office. That would be supporting the safety of women. But by that logic, she would have opposed Trump.
She hasn’t done any of these and she won't, because she doesn't give a damn. All of this is just about attention and the climb towards power.
Biologically segregated spaces are not inherently transphobic; discussing them is not inherently bigoted; and there are cases of obvious overreach, where social inclusion of trans people gets put before the safety of women and girls. But this isn’t any of that.
It's anti-trans bigotry, wielded as political showboating, justified with vague references to feminism, and its chief goal is to get Nancy Mace more attention — which is all she wants.