Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) went after her colleague, Rep. Nancy Mace (S.C.), on Wednesday, accusing the Republican lawmaker of bullying the chamber’s first openly trans lawmaker to “make a buck … and fundraise off an email.”
Mace introduced a measure to ban transgender women from using the women’s bathrooms at the Capitol earlier this week, using demeaning language about her new colleague, Delaware Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D). McBride made history earlier when she won the state’s lone seat in the House, becoming the first openly transgender person elected to Congress.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) confirmed Wednesday that he would follow through with the plans and ban transgender lawmakers and staff from using bathrooms that don’t correspond to their “biological sex.”
“Women deserve women’s only spaces,” Johnson said.
Ocasio-Cortez lambasted the effort in brief remarks to reporters, saying the move would only endanger girls and women around the country.
“What it inevitably results in are women and girls who are primed for assault because people are going to want to check their private parts in suspecting who is trans, and who is cis, and who’s doing what,” the New York Democrat said. “And so the idea that Nancy Mace wants little girls and women to drop trou[sers] in front of who? An investigator? Who would that be?”
“Because she wants to suspect and point fingers at who she thinks is trans? It is disgusting.”
McBride responded to the new rules on Wednesday, saying she would comply with them because she wasn’t heading to Congress “to fight about bathrooms.”
“I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families,” she said in a statement. “Like all members, I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them.”
Democracy In The Balance
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Ocasio-Cortez went on to say Republicans were leaning into culture wars to rile up their base, part of a larger movement by the GOP to go after trans Americans.
“People have a right to express themselves, to dress how they want and to be who they are,” she said. “They’re doing this so that Nancy Mace can make a buck and send a text and fundraise off an email.”
“They’re not doing it to protect people,” she went on. “They’re endangering women, they’re endangering girls of all kinds and everybody should reject it. It’s gross.”