Out With The Old, In With The New: Trans Legislative Edition!
Not everything is the same in 2025, just the worst stuff!
2025 looks to be a year with quite a lot more of the same with respect to anti-trans legislation, but not everything is monotonously boring. In Utah there is a significant shift as one famously anti-trans legislator heaves off, and in DC Sarah McBride is finally — finally! — the first official trans member of the US House of Representatives. So let’s take a look at a couple of changes in state and federal legislatures this January!
The Old
Republican Kera Birkeland has chosen to move on from her current gig as a Utah state representative to embrace her current gig as head of a lobbying shop, the Montana Grain Growers Association.
Wait, what?
You read that correctly. For the last six months, while the Utah legislature has been out of session, but technically Birkeland was both still in office and running for a new term, she has headed the MGGA.
Birkeland has held a hundred meetings across Utah to determine the best way to discriminate against trans people, and wrote all her ideas into the same, mind-numbingly repetitive No Sports For Trans People law that any bigot could have written. She didn’t have to traipse around the state. Birkeland got huffy when her law to crack down on trans kids was used to say that a cis high school girl was a little too good at sports to be really female, resulting in so many threats that the poor kid needed police protection to play basketball. Or maybe you remember her from that time she and the Utah state auditor got into a public fight over how far the state was supposed to stick its governmental nose into bathroom stalls.
You know, for kids!
The motive here appears to be avoiding ethics laws in the pursuit of greenback Amero bucks. She said she was resigning to spend more time with her family — like five minutes after being re-elected — but there’s also the matter that Utah law prohibits a legislator from also being a lobbyist, extends the lobbying ban for another 12 months after leaving the legislature, and even requires disclosing jobs like this one on conflict of interest forms (which Birkeland did not do).
BUT that law only applies to Utah, and Birkeland’s new job is in Montana. Also she swears this job that walks like a lobbying job and quacks like a lobbying job is not a lobbying job. It’s not lobbying, she swears! She’s just working with federal legislators on the national farm bill! Something something FAITH AND FAMILY!
Good riddance.
The New!
While Birkeland was busy cleaning out her office this week, Democrat Sarah McBride was moving into the office of Delaware’s sole member of the US House of Representatives.
McBride was sworn in on Friday and now has an official photo up on her official US House website. Deal with it, Nancy Mace.
From The Advocate:
Congresswoman Sarah McBride, a history-making Democrat from Delaware, was sworn in Friday afternoon as the first out transgender member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Representing Delaware’s At-Large Congressional District, McBride took the oath of office using her family’s childhood Bible, marking a moment she described as “surreal” and “awe-inspiring.”
And while Mace hasn’t backed down from her principled stance against allowing trans people to pee in peace, the default rules package for this legislative session did not include Mace’s rules for where McBride should be allowed to pee:
This doesn’t mean that everything is smooth sailing. But if congressional Republicans are going to ban trans people from using the only bathrooms that make sense, they’ll have to push through a separate rule change or law. And while they might have the votes to do that, their majority is razor thin.
The comprehensive rules package generally gets little press coverage and is implemented all-or-nothing in a procedure that doesn’t allow for amendments or excisions. Had the ban been included, it would certainly have passed as it is necessary to have rules for the House to function. (Haha, a Republican House functioning, haha!) But now that a bathroom ban requires separate congressional action with a vote solely on trans bathroom use, there’s reasonable hope that trans people and their allies can focus attention on the effort and convince two or three Republicans to be conveniently away from the floor when it comes time to vote. Just that, even without any GOP reps voting against bigotry, would be enough to make sure the effort fails.
All in all, we could start the year a lot worse than Birkeland shoving off, McBride ringing in, and Nancy Mace having to take another L.
Your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke also writes Pervert Justice!
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Nancy Mace is a petty, vain, ignorant, arrogant, malicious, shit-disturbing attention-whore.
I wish her luck.
And hope she does a good job.