TWIBS: Good News from the Bathroom
Sorry to harp about bathrooms lately, but we’ve got a win this time!
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Okay, okay, okay… I know I shouldn’t cover a bathroom-related story for TWIBS two weeks in a row, but considering the current doom and/or gloom climate surrounding legislation against trans people? We need a win. And this one is, believe it or not, a huge dub. As the kids these days say, let’s go! Fortnite! Robux!
Sorry.
So, if you aren’t aware (and you should be, since Zooey and her partner, trans journalist Erin Reed, were part of our Stay With Us special!), Zooey Zephyr is the first openly trans Montanan state legislator, who has represented Missoula in the 100th district in the Montana House of Representatives since January of last year. In April of that year Zephyr was censured by the legislature for speaking out against vile anti-trans legislation, unfairly denying her constituents representation if and until she won re-election for a second term.
Which, of course, she did.
Now, perhaps inspired and emboldened by a similar maneuver in DC, members of Montana’s House of Representatives tried to pass rules that would have banned Zephyr from utilizing the correct bathroom at the State Capitol. As Jo Yurcaba reports for NBC News, the measure was introduced by Republican Representative Jerry Schillinger, and would have required representatives to use bathrooms that aligned with the gender they were falsely assigned at birth.
Shockingly (and, of course, the reason I called this good news), the measure failed to pass a joint House and Senate Rules Committee hearing. To pass it would have had to garner majority support in both chambers, and while a majority of the Senate voted in favor of the measure, Zephyr’s colleagues in the House did not. Even more shockingly, four Republicans voted against the measure!
As reported by Yurcaba and seen in a YouTube video posted by Erin Reed, Republican Representative David Bedey said, “This particular action will have the effect of making people famous in the national news and will not contribute to the effective conduct of our business.” Meanwhile, Republican Representative Brad Barker agreed that the measure was “a distraction.”
Truly, reader, I am just as floored as you are to hear Republican lawmakers conducting themselves in a thoughtful manner on the topic of transgender people and bathrooms. I don’t anticipate seeing much of that over the next four years, so I’m going to soak it all up and appreciate it while I can, and you should too.
Speaking about the failed measure on Twitter (formerly known as X), Zephyr said, “I'm happy to see that this proposed ban failed and am grateful for my colleagues—particularly my republican colleagues—who recognized this as a distraction from the work we were elected to do. I'm ready to represent my constituents & look forward to working on behalf of Montana.”
It’s no surprise to those of us at Assigned Media that Zephyr is a class act, and it’s nice to see a trans woman mark one down in the W column these days. It would be even nicer, moving forward, to see lawmakers with a big R next to their names recognize this kind of crap as the glory seeking distraction that it is.
But again. Don’t hold your breath.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
