Nancy Mace's Potty Parable

Conservative bigotry doesn’t grow on trees. It takes work, and unending vigilance, to keep women vulnerable and afraid

U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) exits the Capitol in February, 2024. Photo credit: Philip Yabut/Shutterstock

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If it isn’t bad enough that white liberals are blaming the Democrats’ across the board loss of all three branches of government of transgender people, the Republicans— who I have previously characterized as the sorest winners in American history—have found a new way to demand second class citizenship for trans people. Nancy Mace (SC-01) has introduced legislation barring transfeminine women from facilities on Capitol Hill designated for women.

As it happens, one of Mace’s new House colleagues is Democrat Sarah McBride (DE-01): McBride is trans. You can read H.R. 1579 here. Speaker Mike Johnson (LA-04) seems to have prevented a nasty floor fight over a bill targeting a colleague by using his executive power to ban McBride from women’s bathrooms himself. “It is important to note that each Member office has its own private restroom, and unisex restrooms are available throughout the Capitol," Johnson announced this afternoon. "Women deserve women's only spaces." 

Weirdly, no one ever asks why women deserve women’s only spaces. Like, in the 21st century, what’s the logic for that? And how many women’s-only spaces are enough? Nor, as far as I can tell, did anyone ask Johnson why Mace can’t just use her own potty if she is worried about running into McBride in a public restroom; or why he doesn’t legislate more women’s bathrooms in theaters and baseball stadiums.

Shaming a newly-elected colleague isn’t an unparalleled act of hatred in Congress—the caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by slave-holding Congressman Preston Brooks on the Senate floor—still wins that award, although it is interesting that Mace, like Brooks, represents South Carolina. 

But it’s nasty. And Mace seems to enjoy the spotlight that her trans hatred has won her. She has been theatrically pasting handwritten labels with the word “Biological” over restroom signs that say Women. She has also announced that has a history of sexual assault, and that meeting McBride in the bathroom would trigger her PTSD.

We “listen to women” on this Substack, so we are going to stipulate that Nancy Mace was sexually assaulted, and that she does have PTSD. Mace’s personal history as the first woman to graduate from The Citadel gives us a good guess as to where she was sexually assaulted. Interestingly, if this is true, at the time she was a woman in a man’s space; sexual assault is a way men, and particularly military men, remind women that they do not belong.

In other words, you would think that Mace would have a more nuanced take on single-sex spaces than she apparently has.

Mace seems to think that all women suffer from the same anxiety about men and transfeminine people, whether they have been sexually assaulted or not. As Raquel Martin of WKBN News (Youngstown, Ohio) reported, Mace—like Donald Trump—plans to protect women whether they like to or not:

“I’m going to stand in the way of anyone crazy enough to let men in women’s spaces,” Mace said.

Mace says she’s pushing the resolution to protect women.

“I’m a rape survivor and I have PTSD from the abuse I suffered at the hands of a man, and I know how vulnerable women and girls are in private spaces,” Mace said.

Yet, as Brad Palumbo pointed out at MSNBC, Mace has, until quite recently, portrayed herself as an LGBTQ ally. This makes sense, since super-queer Charleston is in her district. In addition, Lindsey Graham is the most senior member of the South Carolina delegation, and that automatically makes you at least gay-friendly. But Mace went further:

“I strongly support LGBTQ rights and equality,” Mace told [Palumbo in 2021.] “No one should be discriminated against.”

“I have friends and family that identify as LGBTQ,” she explained. “Understanding how they feel and how they’ve been treated is important. Having been around gay, lesbian, and transgender people has informed my opinion over my lifetime.”

Finally, it’s hard to believe that Mace feels so unsafe around men. Her own caucus is a sausage party: only 34 out of 219 Republicans are women. Mace has also been married to two men, engaged to a third, and has a son. So, it’s hard to imagine that sharing a private space with someone she believes to be a man is too terribly traumatizing.

But here’s the main point: Sarah McBride isn’t a man. Nor has she any record of violence, unlike Donald Trump, cabinet nominees Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and too many Republican politicians and Trump staffers than we can name. By comparison, bathroom assaults by transfeminine women are vanishingly rare. In addition, as Palumbo points out, if Republican women are truly afraid of men in bathrooms, they are on the way. Johnson’s new rule will “lead to a perverse situation where transgender men who work in Congress—who may have beards and large muscles and outwardly appear indistinguishable from other men” will be using toilets designated for women only.

So, let’s be real about what Nancy Mace means when she says she doesn’t want to go potty with transgender women: because conservative bigotry doesn’t grow on trees. It takes work, and unending vigilance, to keep women vulnerable and afraid. It requires portraying the object of conservative hatred as a monstrous being who must be kept separate from terrified, vulnerable White women. White men can’t do this job alone: they always need White women to collaborate with them.

Mace’s recent actions, and the campaign against transgender people that drove Republican messaging this year, has a history, one that is Southern, conservative, and tied to the defense of racial segregation. White supremacists consistently portrayed Black men and women as monstrous, hyper-sexual, and violent; and justified segregationist policies by the need to protect White women and girls from sexual assault.

Those attitudes were not the exclusive purview of extremists but considered to be common sense by moderates and some liberals—much as anti-trans attitudes are today. For example, in February 1954, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower hosted a White House dinner. One of the guests was Earl Warren, now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Warren was an Eisenhower nomination. Warren had been sworn in on October 4, 1953, and at the time of the dinner was working with his colleagues to write the opinion in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education

Eisenhower, who had never belonged to a political party or even voted before he ran for President, positioned himself as a civil rights moderate. However, when faced with decisions that might have supported a civil rights claim, or civil rights activists or litigants, he did nothing. True, he presided over the desegregation of the federal civil service and the military. But that process had been initiated by Democratic President Harry S Truman, who signed executive orders to that effect in July 1948 (an election year, no less) and it was well underway by the time Eisenhower took office.

So, although it was completely inappropriate for Eisenhower to discuss the pending decision in Brown, he did it anyway because he was a bigot. And this is what the President said to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court as he drew Warren aside during the coffee part of the evening: that White parents who opposed racial mixing in schools were “not bad people. All they are concerned about,” the president continued, “is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big black bucks.” 

In his memoirs, Warren changed the wording to “overgrown Negroes,” something he imagined was less offensive. But you get the point: a male, Black child who was the age-peer of a female, White child was not a child at all, but a brutal, sexualized beast who could not be trusted with proximity to a helpless, innocent girl. And parents were right to be concerned about that.

This is the spurious logic by which Americans are now being taught, not just to fear transgender people, but that transgender people deserve second-class citizenship and the humiliation of segregation. What better way to nationalize anti-trans legislation than to install it in the nation’s capital? It makes it normal. 

Nancy Mace, Mike Johnson, and the Republican Party have activated an old playbook: the next thing you know, they’ll find a member of the Democratic House Caucus to deport.

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Short takes:

• Department of When We Win, We Lose. After a nearly seven-month strike, Boston University graduate students won recognition for their union, but new membership will dwindle: there will be no first-year class in about a dozen humanities and social sciences programs. According to Ryan Quinn of Inside Higher Ed, the pause is part of a program review that “includes not just completely pausing admissions for some programs, but reducing the number of students in others next academic year.” English, history, and philosophy—where the job market for new, tenure-stream faculty has been shrinking at an accelerated rate for fifteen years—are among the doctoral programs that could be eliminated. (November 19, 2024)

• Those who have already crimed will receive preference. Despite the GOP’s high tolerance for felonious behavior, Republican Senators are telling President-elect Donald Trump that the cocaine and statutory rape accusations make former Congressman Matt Gaetz a non-starter for Attorney General. But Trump thinks that’s a plus! He “wants a team of outlaws: likeminded pals who ignore laws, boundaries, ethics, norms, civility, respect, and plain manners,” Jill Lawrence writes at The Bulwark. “People whose unforced missteps, mistakes, and worse are now a badge of honor; a mark of achievement; a prerequisite for the job; and a permission slip to bend 330 million people to their will as part of a Trump administration—or from outside it, as we’re already seeing with co-president and diplomatic kibitzer Elon Musk.” (November 18, 2024)

• Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, right doc?. Even though there is no medical facility where you can get an abortion in Mississippi, a group of anti-abortion docs want to make sure that they can’t be prosecuted for not recommending the procedure when it might be called for. A 1998 state Supreme Court decision ruled that “the right to an abortion for Mississippians conflicts with state law that bans most abortions in Mississippi,” Bobby Hinds writes for Mississippi Today. However, “the conservative physicians group pointed out the ambiguity of the issue since in normal legal proceedings a Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of an issue would trump state law.” (November 18, 2024)

And here’s a bonus: all new annual paid subscriptions include a free copy of my book about political media, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.)