Newly-elected member of the U.S. House of Representatives Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), the first openly transgender person elected to serve in the United States Congress, along with newly-elected Rep. Emily Randall (D-WA), right, and Rep. Sarah Elfreth (D-MD), left, before the official new member photo was taken on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Friday, Nov. 15 in Washington, DC.
House Republicans have spent the past week arguing about restrooms, but it really has nothing to do with restrooms. It’s about respect.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) introduced a resolution to ban Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-DE) from using women’s facilities on the Hill on Tuesday, and by Wednesday Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) issued a rule requiring people to only use restrooms that align with their sex assigned at birth.
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With all the attention Republicans have been drawing to this — Mace herself posted over a hundred times about the matter on social media — one has to ask: Is this the welcome the first transgender person elected to Congress in U.S. history gets?
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For many on the right, to be LGBTQ+ is to be unworthy of respect. Queer and trans people — especially trans people at the moment — aren’t accorded the same deference that other people take for granted. Humanity, to those heavily invested in gender roles, is determined by one’s gender, and existing outside of the boundaries set by heteronormative culture — the expectation that one’s sex assigned at birth, gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender expression should all align in one of two set ways — means that a gender non-conforming person simply doesn’t have the same humanity that everyone else has.
On the other hand, an elected official is, by their nature, someone who is afforded respect. They are addressed with formal, proscribed titles. They are given an office, a staff, and resources to do their work. They have power and a platform, and those were given to them because the people of their home district wanted them to have those things.
So it’s important to remember that the immediate issue at hand wasn’t an issue for years. It only became an issue literally on Tuesday of this week.
There have been transgender people in Congress before. Trans people have visited the Capitol to sightsee and lobby Congress on various issues. Trans people have been interns and worked on congressional staffs. Trans reporters have interviewed members of Congress or attended hearings, along with trans witnesses at those hearings. A few members of Congress have trans family members and children who have visited them at work.
Mace never said anything in all the years she was in Congress about any of these people using the restroom.
What happened in the past two weeks was the contradiction between Mace’s belief that trans people are not to be respected and her knowledge that society respects elected officials. The contradiction created a tension that Mace tried to resolve by reducing McBride’s humanity to her trans identity and reducing her trans identity to her genitalia.
So she lashed out by making sure that the first thing most Americans know about McBride will be which bathroom she’s being told to use. Broadly speaking, there are only two kinds of people who get told when and where they have to use the restroom: children and inmates. Neither is seen as worthy of deference in our culture.
Moreover, human waste and genitalia are private matters, but both of those topics have been discussed in connection to McBride this week on national television. The point was to degrade her and associate her with human waste.
All this while all-but-accusing her of being a sexual deviant for no reason other than her identity.
Mace’s disrespect is meant to dehumanize all trans people
Respect can be thought of as the collective opinion group members hold of an individual, and feeling respected is a human need, it lends itself to a sense of having a place in society.
“Respect serves a critical function by communicating information about a person’s inclusion within a social group,” Yuen Huo and Kevin Binning of the University of California, Los Angeles wrote, reviewing studies on respect. “These findings are consistent with the idea that respect is rooted in a fundamental need for acknowledgment that one is an accepted member of the group and that one belongs.”
Mace went further than just trying to control McBride’s bathroom use. She deadnamed McBride. Not using someone’s preferred name is, for everyone, cis or trans, a sign of disrespect. She discussed what she thinks McBride’s genitalia are in public, making the private a matter of public discussion, another sign of disrespect. She has referred to McBride with “it,” dehumanizing her.
The message is that McBride doesn’t belong in Congress and, more broadly, that trans people don’t belong in society.
So it’s no wonder that McBride is refusing to engage in this discussion and trying to bring the focus off of her body and back to her work. She hasn’t had a chance to make a name for herself in Congress yet and, already, people she has never met are discussing her body in degrading ways.
That is, she doesn’t want to be known as Congresswoman Potty, and the more she responds to Mace, the more likely it is that people will associate her with the bathroom.
But this issue is now bigger than McBride. While it’s not seen as respectable to discuss bathroom usage at length, that doesn’t make it any less real of a physical need. Whenever people are asked to spend a few hours in a certain place, restrooms are going to be a practical concern.
This is the case with the Capitol, which isn’t just a huge office building but several huge office buildings that have the same size footprint as some neighborhoods. Off-campus restrooms are a long walk away from the Capitol and just not a practical solution for everyone who has business in Congress. Not having access to Capitol restrooms means not having access to the Capitol.
McBride (like all Congress members) will have a private bathroom in her office, so she’ll be fine, for the most part.
Trans people who want to talk to their members of Congress are going to be denied their right to petition their elected officials. And for trans staff, this creates a labor issue.
But Republicans hold a majority in the House and they elected a hyper-religious transphobe to lead them. McBride’s Democratic colleagues should be standing up, vocally, for her humanity, and many already have. In doing so, they’re also standing up for the trans people in the Capitol who don’t have access to private bathrooms.
As for now… maybe one day Johnson and Mace can learn that if they refuse to treat all people with respect, they will be the ones denied respect.
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