On April 18, Democratic state Representative Zooey Zephyr spoke out on the floor of the Montana legislature against Senate Bill 99, a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for trans youth. Zephyr, who was elected from Missoula last November as the first openly trans woman in the state assembly, with more than 79 percent of the vote, was prevented from speaking for the remainder of the legislative session. Targeted for saying that members of the Republican supermajority would have “blood on [their] hands,” Zephyr was forced to work from a hallway in the capitol building and could only cast votes using her laptop. Speaking on a video call on May 8, Zephyr described to The Progressive what had occurred:
“I had spoken to the very real way in which that bill [would get] members of my community killed, directly and indirectly.
“After doing so, the speaker refused to recognize me. And after several days of not recognizing me, I argued, ‘You are not just silencing me; you are taking away the voice of my 11,000 constituents.’ He said, ‘You need to apologize for what you said,’ and I replied, ‘I spoke directly to real harm that happens to my community, and I will not apologize.’ So he said, ‘Then I’m not going to recognize you going forward on any bill.’
“Many of my constituents and others across the state who recognized this as an attack on democracy came to a rally. And many of them were in the gallery watching and stayed there for several hours.
“When I punched in on a bill to speak and was not recognized, they stood and chanted, ‘Let her speak!’ And in doing so, they were acknowledging, ‘Our voice has been taken. This is not how democracy works. Let our representative speak.’
“The speaker refused to let me speak and gaveled them down. A few days later, the House convened to censure me and removed me from the people’s house entirely, pushing me out into a common area, disallowing me from debate on the floor, and only allowing me to vote remotely. And even that, even sitting outside in the public area, was something I had to fight for.”
Zephyr ended up setting up a desk in a public area near the chamber.
“The goal was to be as close to the people’s house as legally allowed,” she explains. “That’s what we’re sent to do. We are sent here to represent our constituents. We are sent here to be their voice. If a supermajority can, for any reason, entirely silence a member of the minority, that should be very concerning—harrowing even—for anyone who cares about the democratic principles that underlie our country.”
The same sort of legislative supermajority was used silence to three lawmakers in Tennessee in early April when they protested against gun violence from the chamber floor, and in March in Oklahoma during a protest against anti-trans legislation. Zephyr says she has spoken with the other silenced lawmakers regarding the similarities and differences of their situations. (In Tennessee, Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were expelled from the legislature, but the Memphis City and Nashville Metro Councils later re-appointed them to their former seats. In Oklahoma, Republicans censured state Representative Mauree Turner, the first openly nonbinary and first Muslim person elected to that state’s legislature.)
“What we see is the way in which those in power, particularly those on the far right, are willing to utilize the tools of the system they’ve gained power over to force silence. It’s not enough to get the bills through. They are trying to squash dissent itself,” she says.
“In Montana, they said I breached decorum,” Zephyr continues, “but I have seen the way in which decorum has been utilized unequally across the session and when decorum was used as a cudgel to squash dissent. We had Republican representatives who screamed during the closings of their testimonies. We had people who insinuated that my very existence as a trans person was somehow a threat to children. I had a Republican [state] senator come up to me and confess that years back he had used the phrase ‘blood on your hands.’ ”
In response, the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana and others filed a lawsuit against state House Speaker Matt Reiger and Sergeant at Arms Bradley Murfitt to challenge what Zephyr sees as her undemocratic censure.
“You are not just silencing me; you are taking away the voice of my 11,000 constituents.”
“The idea there is twofold,” she explains. “Firstly, we have in this country a right to free speech. That free speech does not go away when you become an elected official. You do not have fewer Constitutional protections as an elected official than you would as a citizen. Secondly, my constituents, the citizens of Montana who elected me, have a right to representation. And if one branch of government can set up a process to strip citizens of their right to representation, that’s an inherently undemocratic thing to do, and it is something the court should be stepping in [to resolve].”
The next session of the Montana legislature—which meets every other year—isn’t until 2025. But Zephyr has already declared her candidacy for 2024 and is working to create a larger Democratic majority in that election.
“My expectation is that if I’m sent back in 2025, I’ll be speaking on legislation,” she says. “My censure [will be] formally over, and I will be back in and speaking. We’ll do our best to make sure that they do not have that level of majority so that they cannot silence me or anyone else who holds them accountable for the harm their bills bring. Montana’s fortunate in that we are one of the states that has a nonpartisan redistricting commission, and due to this, we have maps that, for the first time in ten years, are going to reflect the way in which population growth in Montana has shifted.”
In an interview with PBS reporter Laura Barrón-López on election night last year, Zephyr said, “We have to have trans voices in these rooms if we’re going to change what kind of bills Montana’s passing.” Now she is working to create that change.
“I am trying to travel across the state of Montana. I’m going to be meeting with Democratic organizations and nonprofits out there and saying, ‘Hey, what do you need? Who are you talking to? How do we make sure that we can do this work together?’ That we don’t just say, yes, that was a bad thing that happened, and, yes, we can and should change it, but how do we make sure we’re doing the work, day in, day out?
“I’m also connecting with members of the Tennessee Three, state Representative Turner [in Oklahoma], and others across the country to say, ‘How do we recognize that we are seeing a growing willingness from our young progressive leaders to stand up to the powerful and not just acquiesce to that sort of political machinery, and to recognize that it’s what our communities want?’ That’s what our constituents want,” she explains. “How do we make sure that this moment . . . can take root as a movement?”