Nancy Mace, a sitting congresswoman, openly uses insults online

Nancy Mace, a sitting congresswoman, openly uses insults online

Getty Images; X.com

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Note: This article contains a discussion of transphobic, homophobic, gender-based, and racial slurs.

As if standing out in Congress with anti-trans legislation wasn’t enough, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina has a new hobby: she says the T-slots, often and preferably in front of the camera.

Mace, who introduced a proposal to ban trans women from women’s restrooms on Capitol Hill last month shortly after Rep. Sarah McBride was elected, prominently used the insult no less than three times in posts on X this week. Her first post was made on the evening of December 4, following public demonstrations outside the Supreme Court that morning. In the video, a Mace employee hands the representative a book and says it is the office sign-in book, which activists allegedly defaced. “Oh, it’s the trannies,” Mace noted in the video.

The following Thursday, Mace doubled down on the slur’s use in another video after trans activists including Raquel Willis and Chelsea Manning staged a bathroom sit-in and were arrested. Mace – who had reportedly sent her staff searching for a megaphone earlier that day – traveled to the prison where the activists were being held and read the Miranda warning aloud on her phone. Mace led the video by referring to the activists as “trans protesters,” sarcastically calling them “poor guys” for getting arrested, and making an odd aside about public defenders by apparently mocking those arrested who can’t afford a lawyer . In a subsequent post later that afternoon, Mace wrote tripled and wrote: “The trannies came, they saw, and they did not win during their protest.” She posted one shortly afterwards Donation request.

All of Mace’s posts were still available on X as of Friday morning. The latter two now contain a moderation warning noting that Mace “against the Mace seemed to be hopping crazy, complained late Thursday that the platform had “censored” them by limiting the visibility of posts and tagging X owner Elon Musk (who had previously declared the term “cis” or “cisgender” on the site to be an insult).

Mace is certainly not the first sitting member of Congress to use a derogatory slur in public, but her repeated, gleeful use of the term sets her apart from many previous incidents of this kind dating back to the 1990s that typically occurred on Capitol Hill He was expected to express remorse for this.

Earlier this year, Maryland Democrat David Trone lost his bid for the Senate primary after he used a racial slur during a hearing, for which he apologized, saying that his use was inadvertent and that he had intended to use the word “bogeyman.” to use. Last year, Republican Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona said he “misspoke” when he referred to black people as “colored” while debating an amendment on the floor of the House. Florida Republican Ted Yoho apologized in 2020 for calling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “fucking bitch.” In 2013, Alaska Republican Don Young used the insult “wetbacks” in a radio interview, initially saying he “meant no disrespect” but later apologizing after then-House Speaker John Boehner called on him to do so. And in 1995, then-Republican Majority Leader Dick Army of Texas referred to Democrat Barney Frank as “Barney Fag” in an interview, later apologizing and claiming he had mispronounced Frank’s last name.

Raquel Willis, Chelsea Manning and others arrested in Trans Solidarity Capitol bathroom “sit-in.”

Those arrested shouted, “Speaker Johnson, Nancy Mace, our bodies are not a debate!”

In all of these cases, the politicians have either apologized for their comments or otherwise walked them back – but in Mace’s case it’s clearly about being offensive as the MP continues her descent down the far-right rabbit hole. Ari Dlaufen from As Media Matters observed On the far right because he opposes the Trump/MAGA movement.

So far, Mace has received little backlash from her colleagues on Capitol Hill, both Republicans and Democrats, for her repeated use of slurs this week; Few sitting members of Congress have spoken publicly, and the Progressive or Equality Caucuses have not yet issued any statements related to Mace’s comments. For some, this raises the question of whether insults and demeaning speech against transgender people are held to a different standard than other offensive speech, as transphobia has become a pillar of the modern Republican Party; The lack of an immediate response may also be related to Rep. McBride’s comments to Democratic colleagues last month in which she said measures like Mace’s bathroom ban — which would affect other transgender people more than McBride himself — were a “distraction” and largely so do should be ignored.

One exception was Florida Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, who called Mace’s language “disgusting and bigoted” in an interview post on his personal account Thursday evening.

“People who use this type of despicable language should not be leading anyone on,” Frost wrote.

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Originally appeared on them.

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