How Montana House Rep. Zooey Zephyr Was Censured For Defending Trans Americans

Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr has recently been thrust into the national spotlight after her Republican colleagues voted to remove her from the floor following comments she made about S.B. 99, one of a wave of anti-trans legislation introduced across the country. In 2022, Zephyr became the first trans person elected to Montana’s state legislature, the same year Republicans won a supermajority in the state legislature.

The bill’s transphobia is blatant. The Human Rights Campaign said the bill would “make it effectively impossible for health care practitioners to provide age-appropriate, best-practice, gender-affirming care to transgender youth,” and the Associated Press reported the bill would have doctors’ medical licenses suspended if they provided banned gender-affirming care. Montana’s governor Greg Gianforte called gender-affirming care “Orwellian newspeak” and even proposed amendments stipulating public funds couldn’t go toward puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries. In a map of anti-trans bills, The Washington Post found the number of these bills skyrocketed over the past year from 150 in 2022 to 400 in 2023.

According to The New Yorker, two incidents catalyzed Zephyr’s censure. On April 18, she warned her colleagues on the house floor, “If you vote yes on [S.B. 99], 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.” After this statement, Zephyr faced demands for apologies and was ignored by House Speaker Matt Reiger during subsequent debates. Less than a week after her explosive statement, a supportive audience chanted from the House gallery, demanding leadership let her speak. Zephyr held her microphone over her head toward the protestors. This was the final straw. On April 26, Zephyr was removed from the House floor for violating the “safety, dignity, integrity, and decorum of the House of Representatives.”

While powerful, the metaphor of having “blood on your hands” is hardly a new statement to the political realm, as NPR noted, and it’s hard to see how it could violate Montana House’s “safety, dignity, integrity, and decorum.”

Zephyr’s censure comes after two Black state representatives in Tennessee were expelled for joining peaceful protests supporting gun control, and a Nebraska politician was investigated for having a conflict of interest because she had a trans child and testified against an anti-trans law. When contrasted with conservative hand-wringing about “cancel culture” that paints Democrats as anti-free speech, the GOP’s recent pattern of punishing Democratic politicians for speaking up against conservative policies is a far more severe (and real) form of silencing. The Republican Party is willing to strip trans people of the right to live their truth, women of the right to bodily autonomy, and children of the right to attend school without fearing a mass shooting. Yet, they cannot handle it when the people impacted by their policies push back. They approach criticism not with debate but draconian measures to shield themselves from feeling the true harm of their lawmaking.

After her expulsion, Zephyr continued to work on a public bench outside the chamber and asked a Montana court to let her return to the floor, a request that was ultimately rejected. Gianforte eventually signed S.B. 99 into law. However, Zephyr’s dedication to protecting trans kids hasn’t wavered. When she was finally allowed to return to the floor on May 2, she gave a scathing critique of her Republican colleagues.

“Here in this session, I think [the GOP] overplayed their hand and said … ‘We’re going to throw away democracy, that’s what we’ll do altogether, just toss it to the side to achieve the goals we want,’ with a brand of, quite frankly, Christian nationalism that is trying to put down roots in this part of our state.”