Trump's cabinet picks—not trans Rep. Sarah McBride—are the real threat to women

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Today is Trans Day of Remembrance, an annual day to honor trans people who’ve died as a result of anti-trans violence—people like Nex Benedict, a trans teen from Oklahoma who was beaten by classmates this past February and died the next day. But instead of respecting the solemnity of the day, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson decided to use it to wage violence against his trans colleague. 

Sarah McBride will become the first openly trans member of Congress come January, a fact that is driving Republicans to the kind of outrageous, bigoted, antisocial behavior that has become a cornerstone of the modern party.  On Monday Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a resolution seeking to ban transgender women from using the women’s bathroom in the Capitol building. 

This gross stunt for attention was aimed specifically at incoming Democratic Rep. McBride of Delaware, and Mace proudly admitted as much. 

"Yes and absolutely, and then some," Mace told reporters Tuesday when asked if she was targeting McBride. "I’m absolutely 100% gonna stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women’s restroom, in our locker rooms, in our changing rooms. I will be there fighting you every step of the way."

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson took things a step further on Wednesday. Instead of commenting on whether or not he’d support Mace’s resolution, he released a statement announcing, “All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings—such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms—are reserved for individuals of that biological sex.”

“It is important to note that each Member office has its own private restroom, and unisex restrooms available throughout the Capitol,” he continued. “Women deserve women’s only spaces.”

I am just one woman, but I can say with 100% certainty that Mace isn’t fighting for me. Kylie Cheung put it well when she wrote for Jezebel: “Ironically, Mace is making a lot of women uncomfortable with her preoccupation with our genitals.”

Also ironically, Mace understands acutely what it’s like to be a barrier breaker: In 1999, she became the first female graduate of The Citadel military college in South Carolina. (You may be familiar with the story of Shannon Faulkner, the first woman admitted to The Citadel and whose court case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Faulkner was the first woman to attend but did not remain at the school through graduation. I learned a lot about her from this great podcast episode a few years ago.)

Mace was the Citadel’s commencement speaker this year, marking a quarter century since her historic graduation. "I want to take a brief moment to talk to the female cadets graduating today, because one day, 25 years ago, I made history as one," Mace said in her speech. "As women, we hear a great deal about glass ceilings. But glass is meant to be broken. So, shatter it to pieces."

“As the saying goes, 'With great power comes great responsibility,'” she told the cadets. “So when you get to where you’re going, turn around and help the next woman behind you find her way."

Just months later, Mace has the opportunity to help a woman behind her, and has elected to pull the ladder up instead while McBride steps on the glass. With great power comes great ability to cause pain.

McBride’s Democratic colleagues have responded in a typically toothless manner, but according to sources who spoke with news site NOTUS, “McBride had made obvious in meetings that she wanted her colleagues to talk about policy — and what Republicans weren’t doing — instead.” The sources also said McBride referred to Mace’s stunt as a “distraction.” 

McBride is right: While Mace and her equally unhinged colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene obsess over which bathroom their colleague will use and the totally meritless idea that trans women pose a threat to cisgender women, President-Elect Donald Trump continues to announce new nominations for his cabinet of cisgender men who pose an actual threat to women. According to The 19th, at least four of his picks “have been accused of sexual harassment and assault, and one has faced allegations of child sex trafficking.” 

Yet when it comes to men like Matt Gaetz, Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth, the howler monkeys of the Republican Congress have no concern over where they’re placing their genitals. Gaetz allegedly had sex with a 17-year-old high school student in front of witnesses and the House Ethics Committee is currently deciding whether or not to release its report on him; Musk is facing a sexual harassment lawsuit in which eight former employees allege he shared  “vile sexual photographs, memes and commentary that demeaned women and/or the LGBTQ+ community”; RFK Jr. allegedly sexually assaulted his children’s babysitter; and Hegseth allegedly sexually assaulted a woman whom he later paid an undisclosed amount as part of a nondisclosure agreement. And with Trump, the list of his proven and alleged sexual crimes is endless.

The threat posed to women by Trump’s cabinet is real; the threat posed by Sarah McBride is imagined. And yet one draws Republican applause, while the other draws ire. As I posted on Bluesky yesterday, “I look at this incoming government and all I can see is rape.”

High school student Naomi Beinart, 16, so poignantly wrote in a New York Times opinion piece this week, “We girls woke up to a country that would rather elect a man found liable for sexual abuse than a woman. Where the kind of man my mother instructs me to cross the street to avoid will be addressed as Mr. President. Where the body I haven’t fully grown into may no longer be under my control. The boys, it seemed to me, just woke up on a Wednesday.”

Trump defenders like Mace have even gone so far as demeaning E. Jean Carroll, the writer who successfully sued Trump for sexual abuse, for her “comments when she did get the judgment joking about what she was going to buy,” saying it, “makes it harder for women to come forward when they make a mockery out of rape.” It’s totally within bounds, however, for Mace to use her own rape experience to endanger a new colleague.

“There’s like a 99% chance that Marjorie Taylor Greene or some other right-wing weirdo is going to try to turn what bathroom Sarah is allowed to use at the Capitol into a whole thing,” trans writer Parker Molloy presciently posted a few days after McBride won her election. “Calling it now.”

And here we are.

Conservatives will say this has “triggered” progressives, and you know what? They’re absolutely right. It’s triggering when you tell a lawfully elected member of Congress that she can’t use the bathroom. It’s triggering when bodily autonomy is continually diminished by a party that elected a sexual predator who is planning on installing a cabal of predatory men to run the federal government.

It wasn’t simply enough to win control of the White House and both houses of Congress; no, intimidation and subjugation remain key ingredients in the stew within which too many Americans have found themselves wading waist-deep. Your body, their choice.

On this Trans Day of Remembrance, let’s not just remember those who have died, but those who are alive–and who we still have the power to protect.