Banished transgender state Rep. Zooey Zephyr returned to the Montana state capitol Thursday — spending her first day in exile working on a hallway bench outside the House chambers.
Security threatened to boot the 34-year-old Democrat from the bench she was using as a desk, listening remotely to a debate a day after she was barred from the chamber for the rest of the session for accusing those wanting to ban gender-affirming care for kids of having “blood on your hands.”
The Republican house speaker also warned Zephyr that she shouldn’t be there.
“I walked out yesterday with my head held high,” said Zephyr, who was accused of putting other lawmakers’ lives at risk by encouraging protests.
“I walked in with my head held high today, ready to do my job,” she said as she set up her makeshift office, across from a snack stand in a noisy hallway.
The lawmaker, the first openly transgender woman elected to Montana’s legislature, said that her removal for the rest of the session — ending next week — merely gives more oxygen to her fight.
“There are many more eyes on Montana now,” Zephyr said.
“But you do the same thing you’ve always done. You stand up in defense of your community and you … stand for the principles that they elected you to stand for,” she said.
“It’s queer people across the world and it’s also the constituents of other representatives who are saying, ‘They won’t listen’ when it comes to these issues. It’s staff in this building who, when no one is looking, come up and say ‘Thank you,’” she said.
Zephyr can vote remotely, but can’t talk about proposals and amendments that are being debated among the 99 Montana house members.
Her initial comments — and refusal to back down from them — have made Zephyr a prominent figure in the nationwide battle for transgender rights.
Her banishment has also been compared to the Tennessee lawmakers expelled for joining gun control protests over the Nashville school shooting. Those lawmakers were soon reinstated and embraced by President Biden.
Likening her own case to that one, Zephyr said that Tennessee lawmakers not only rejected gun control laws but sent a troubling message: “‘Your voices shouldn’t be here. We’re going to send you away.’”
House Majority Leader Sue Vinton accused Zephyr of putting lawmakers and staffers in danger because of her actions during protests in the Chamber that saw seven people arrested Monday.
Republican David Bedey called it “an assault on our representative democracy, spirited debate, and the free expression of ideas cannot flourish in an atmosphere of turmoil and incivility.”
With Post wires
