Montana’s House speaker is refusing to recognize and allow transgender lawmaker Zooey Zephyr to speak on the House floor until she apologizes for saying lawmakers would have “blood on their hands" if they supported a bill to ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth.
To add insult to injury, many of the conservative lawmakers are deliberately referred to her using male pronouns. Representative Zephyr said she will not apologize, creating a standoff between the first-term state lawmaker and Republican legislative leaders.
The issue came to a head when Zephyr told lawmakers if they supported an anti-Trans bill, “I hope the next time there's an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.” She made a similar comment when the House debated the bill the first time. House Majority Leader Sue Vinton (and utter snowflake) rebuked Zephyr, calling her comments inappropriate, disrespectful and uncalled for.
Speaker Matt Regier refused to acknowledge Zephyr on Thursday when she wanted to comment on a bill seeking to put a binary definition of male and female into state code. “It is up to me to maintain decorum here on the House floor, to protect the dignity and integrity,” Regier said. “And any representative that I don’t feel can do that will not be recognized.” Democrats objected to Regier's decision, but the House Rules committee and the House upheld his decision on party-line votes. “Hate-filled testimony has no place on the House floor,” snowflake Republican Rep. Caleb Hinkle, a member of the Montana Freedom Caucus (which has also demanded that Zephyr be censured), said in a statement.
Zephyr said she stands by what she said about the consequences of banning essential medical care for transgender youth. The bill would ban transgender minors in Montana from receiving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or surgical procedures. Those are treatments for gender dysphoria, the clinically significant distress caused by feeling that one’s gender identity does not match one’s biological sex. Medical professionals who provided such care would lose their medical licenses for at least a year. “When there are bills targeting the LGBTQ community, I stand up to defend my community,” Zephyr said. “And I choose my words with clarity and precision and I spoke to the real harms that these bills bring.”
Regier also declined to recognize Zephyr when she rang in to speak about another bill, which was unrelated to LGBTQ+ issues and seeks to reimburse hotels that provide shelter to victims of human trafficking. “The speaker is refusing to allow me to participate in debate until I retract or apologize for my statements made during floor debate,” Zephyr said.
The Montana Freedom Caucus demanded that Zephyr be censured n a letter that called for a “commitment to civil discourse” in the same sentence in which it deliberately misgendered her in the same sentence. The caucus also misgendered Zephyr in a Tweet while posting the letter online.
“It is disheartening that the Montana Freedom Caucus would stoop so low as to misgender me in their letter, further demonstrating their disregard for the dignity and humanity of transgender individuals,” Zephyr said in a statement.
At the end of the contentious House session, Democratic Rep. Marilyn Marler asked that the House majority allow Zephyr to speak on the floor going forward. “This body is denying the representative ... the chance to do her job,” Marler said. Before adjournment, Majority Leader Vinton engaged in his own special form of immature and petty bullying, saying "I will let the body know that the representative ... has every opportunity to rectify the situation.”
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