An Insider’s View of the Montana Legislature’s Attacks on Trans Rep. Zooey Zephyr
The tenor of Montana’s legislative session was evident from the start. In January, less than a week into the biannual, monthslong lawmaking process, Republican state Sen. Keith Regier proposed a study to determine whether the federal government’s system of Native American reservations should be dismantled, suggesting rights to lands given to tribes after generations of dispossession should perhaps cease to exist.
Peppered with racist stereotypes, the proposal ultimately crumbled in the face of local and national backlash, but the tone was set.
In the months since, the Montana GOP’s willingness to push the envelope against perceived cultural enemies has only intensified, culminating this week in the exile of Democratic Rep. Zooey Zephyr, the first transgender lawmaker in the state’s history, from the House chamber.
As policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Montana office, Keegan Medrano has been in the Capitol in Helena day after day for the past four months, meeting with lawmakers and advocate on bills impacting Native American and LGBTQ+ communities. For Medrano, a queer descendant of the Muscogee Creek nation, the work is both professional and personal.
“What we’ve been seeing over this session is that there is such disdain, such animus, such disgust with queer people, Indigenous people, people that don’t fit in within their vision of what Montana is,” Medrano told The Intercept. “They have such anger and disdain and disgust that they can’t control it,” he said. “And they’re now weaponizing the institutions to exclude us and police us.”
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Zephyr, a 34-year-old representing the liberal college town of Missoula, found herself in the crosshairs of Montana’s Republican hard-liners after speaking out against the bill to ban medical care for transgender youth.
“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,” Zephyr told her colleagues earlier this month.
That night, in a letter and tweet that deliberately misgendered the Democratic lawmaker, all 21 Montana Freedom Caucus members demanded Zephyr’s censure for “using inappropriate and uncalled-for language during a floor debate.”
Zephyr’s efforts to speak from the gallery in the state capital were repeatedly rebuffed in the days that followed. On Monday, hundreds of protesters converged on Helena. “Let her speak,” they chanted. Capitol police in riot gear were deployed. Seven people were arrested on trespassing charges, including two of Medrano’s staffers.
Among Zephyr’s constituents, a combination of frustration, fear, and outrage had been building from the moment the legislative session began, Medrano said; the protest was a form of release.
“I think that all sort of came out,” he said. “After over 80 days of not only the jokes, not only the questions, but also the policy, and then now, where we’re actually targeting, harassing, being retaliatory toward individuals from those communities.”
For Medrano, there is a throughline that binds Indigenous rights, trans rights, and reproductive rights: three areas where the Republican Party has directed much of its attention this session.
“Every single one of those individuals practices their own sort of body sovereignty and autonomy,” he said. “The Montana Republicans, the Freedom Caucus, they’re all afraid of these people, and so they legislate to extinguish their existence and/or to make their existences not palatable and not a part of what Montana is.”