Nancy Mace’s thinly veiled transphobia is getting old fast—just ask Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“What Nancy Mace, and what Speaker Johnson are doing, [is] endangering all women and girls. Because if you ask them, ‘What is your plan on how to enforce this?’ they won’t come up with an answer,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters after being asked about Mace’s string of targeted anti-transgender resolutions against Delaware’s Representative-elect Sarah McBride, the first ever openly trans woman in Congress.
“The idea that Nancy Mace wants little girls and women to drop trow … because she wants to suspect and point fingers at who she thinks is trans is disgusting,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “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 this to protect people.”
Mace, a GOP representative from South Carolina, introduced a resolution on Tuesday that would forbid trans women from using the restroom that aligns with their gender identity in the U.S. Capitol Building. The only trans elected official in the Capitol Building is Representative-elect Sarah McBride.
“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say. I mean, this is a biological man,” Mace said. She added that McBride “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, period, full stop.”
Mace has continued to shame and harass McBride online. She posted a video of her taping a sign reading “biological” right over a “men’s” bathroom sign in the Capitol building. Early Wednesday morning she posted a video stating that she’d be filing another resolution to “ban biological men from women’s spaces on all federal property all across the country.”
Mace was thus empowered after House Speaker Mike Johnson officially stated that transgender women would be banned from women’s restrooms throughout the Capitol complex. But as Representative Ocasio-Cortez noted, it is very unclear how Johnson plans to enforce this ruling.
Democratic Representative Mark Pocan was also swift to react to Johnson’s decision. “As Chair of the Equality Caucus, I requested a meeting with Speaker Johnson to discuss his bathroom ban and open his eyes to the reality that this policy is cruel, completely unenforceable, and opens the door for abuse, harassment, and discrimination in the halls of Congress,” he wrote on Bluesky.
For her part, McBride has recognized that Mace is out for attention and endeavored to not feed her trollery. “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families,” she said in a statement, “I will follow the rules as outlined by speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them.”
Mace, who is no stranger to spectacle, has made a habit of doing weird, attention-seeking gender cosplay on Capitol Hill. Last October, she wore a shirt bearing a large scarlet letter A after she joined the infamous Matt Gaetz in voting to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a sort of MAGA House mutiny. It was not immediately apparent what the famous Nathaniel Hawthorne character had to do with the speakership fiasco. (Just as confusingly, Mace seems to not be worried about Gaetz lurking around Capitol Hill’s washrooms.) Suffice it to say, her most recent hateful charade, made under the guise of “protecting women,” will likely only result in more women getting hurt.
