Jun 13, 2024; Washington, DC, USA; Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) arrives before a gathering with Former President Donald Trump at the Capitol Hill Club and Congressional House Republicans on June 13, 2024 on Capitol Hill.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) has been on a warpath this week to ban Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-DE) from using the restroom at the Capitol, posting about it over a hundred times this week on social media, making multiple TV appearances to support her position, and eventually getting Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to agree with her and ban McBride.
And for some reason, I’m seeing a lot of people claim on social media and in news media that she used to be a “staunch proponent of trans rights and a fierce LGBTQ+ ally.”
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She was never any such thing. She has been a transphobic extremist ever since her first campaign for Congress. She has made a few, very limited concessions on rights for cis queer people, but she has always been what she currently says she is: a TERF.
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The quote above about how Mace was a “staunch proponent of trans rights” comes from the X account of MeidasTouch, a left-leaning news-and-views website, promoting an article where they claimed that Mace co-sponsored a “transgender rights bill in 2021.”
Nancy Mace has now tweeted hundreds of times about her anti-trans bathroom bill designed to target Rep.-elect Sarah McBride.
But not too long ago, Mace was a staunch proponent of trans rights and a fierce LGBTQ+ ally.
Now, she has sold out an entire community for political gain.
There’s a lot to unpack here, and it’s helpful to lay out some facts before going into the thin case for Mace as an LGBTQ+ ally.
First, Mace has an abysmal score on HRC’s Congressional Scorecard, which tracks Congressmembers’ actions on LGBTQ+ legislation. She got scores of 15 and 14 out of 100 for her first two sessions of Congress. While that’s not as bad as zeroes, even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) got a score over zero (eight) this past session of Congress.
Mace has opposed pretty much every piece of LGBTQ+ legislation introduced in Congress for the past four years, including the Equality Act, which would add LGBTQ+ people to existing federal civil rights legislation; supported several anti-LGBTQ+ amendments added to larger spending bills that rolled back LGBTQ+ rights; and even voted against the LGBTQI+ Data Inclusion Act, which would add questions about LGBTQ+ identity to some federal surveys. She voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act because it would give some protections to transgender inmates.
Then there’s Mace’s campaign tactics, which have been particularly depraved and transphobic, even when compared to other House Republicans. Mace was first elected to Congress in 2020. Her campaign marked her first mention on LGBTQ Nation, when she ran an ad accusing her opponent, then-incumbent Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-SC), of working with Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to pass a law “requiring transgender equality in the military,” a law that Mace claimed led to a local Marine Corps base almost getting shut down.
“Cunningham and Pelosi passed a law requiring transgendered [sic] equality in the military, a liberal mandate that will close Parris Island,” the ad said.
There is no law requiring “transgender equality in the military,” much less one that was passed by Cunningham and Pelosi that led to the Marine base getting closed. Mace made that up for votes and cited an article in her ad to back her claim, but that article wasn’t about trans rights at all.
But since most people who see a TV ad aren’t going to look up its citations, her lie worked. She was voted into Congress. Keep in mind that she told this absurdly transphobic lie before she was ever elected to Congress; if it’s true that Mace was ever “a staunch proponent of trans rights,” it would have to be well before she was in Congress.
Her first reelection campaign in 2022 was even more transphobic. She was facing Democratic challenger Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician. Mace accused Dr. Andrews of giving “SEX CHANGE SURGERY. PUBERTY BLOCKERS. GENDER CHANGING HORMONES. FOR CHILDREN?!” in one ad and “pushing hospitals to administer gender-changing hormones to children as young as four years old” in another ad.
Except Dr. Andrews did no such thing. She worked for a hospital that didn’t provide gender-affirming care to anyone under 18. Her hospital came under fire, though, and she was later forced to resign.
“As a Mother and a human being, If you have even a shred of dignity left, I ask that you stop these desperate attacks and start behaving like someone our kids can look up to,” Dr. Andrews said to Mace in a statement, adding that Mace was running the most “shameful, dishonest, and pathetic gutter-style campaign I have ever witnessed.”
OK, so what’s the case that Mace used to be a “staunch proponent of trans rights”? Well, she voted for the Respect for Marriage Act, which requires the federal and state governments to recognize same-sex marriages performed in states where marriage equality is legal. It’s great that she was one of the Republicans who crossed the aisle and voted for that bill in 2022 in the face of a Supreme Court that indicated it might consider overturning its marriage equality rulings, but that’s not great evidence of allyship when it comes to trans people.
The other piece of legislation that’s being cited, the one that is the focus of the MeidasTouch article, is the Fairness For All Act (FFAA), a bill that LGBTQ+ activists opposed because it was introduced as a way to take support away from the Equality Act. This was in 2021, just after the House passed the Equality Act, which was going to face an uphill battle in the Senate to overcome the upper chamber’s 60-vote requirement to end the filibuster, but still, people had some hope that it would pass.
The FFAA had expansive religious exemptions that only would apply to anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, basically sending the message that if someone says that they don’t want gay people to work for them or they don’t want to serve trans people because of their religion, well then they don’t have to follow the law because LGBTQ+ rights are less important. The same religious exemptions wouldn’t apply to race or religion-based discrimination, showing that the protections were less about religious freedom and more about protecting anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes.
Additionally, the FFAA exempted more businesses from the Equality Act’s requirements. It also gave adoption agencies a “license to discriminate,” effectively allowing them to take state funds while refusing to place children in LGBTQ+ homes.
No Democrats supported the FFAA. HRC didn’t include it in their scorecard for that session of Congress. LGBTQ+ people understood it as an attack – it was meant to be something that the Senate could pass instead of the Equality Act, thwarting the anti-discrimination measure.
Mace caught some limited flak for supporting the FFAA from far-right activists, the ones who apparently didn’t understand what was going on. But the criticism was nowhere near loud enough to threaten her reelection bid.
Other than the FFAA, the other piece of evidence of Mace being an LGBTQ+ ally in the past is a Pride tweet she sent out in 2021. I’ll leave it up to readers to decide if this outweighs everything else.
The pandemic kept all of us from fully celebrating Pride here in the Lowcountry in 2020.
But hopefully, as we finally begin to open back up, we can all come together to celebrate the challenges our LGBTQ+ has overcome, and the bright future ahead. #PrideMonth#Pride2021pic.twitter.com/bJ86bmMSoA
When it comes to the rights of cis queer people, she is willing to accept that the ship has sailed when it comes to marriage rights but she’s against full equality – she still wants us to know that our rights are less important than the whims of straight people.
While Mace isn’t as over-the-top transphobic as, say, Congresswoman Greene, she is obsessed (seriously, over 100 tweets in two days about one trans person’s future bathroom usage) with the idea that people can just be whatever gender they feel they are without her express permission. And she has been for years.
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