South Carolina House Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC1) has been breaking ground for women since she was a teenager. In 1999, Mace became the first woman to graduate from The Citadel’s Corps of Cadets program. In 2020, Mace was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first Republican woman elected to Congress from South Carolina.
Despite being anti-abortion, she has been outspoken as a rape survivor about the importance of victims of rape and incest having abortion as an option. In 2019, Mace successfully advocated for the inclusion of exceptions for rape and incest in a bill for a six-week abortion ban that passed the South Carolina state house.
In a speech on the state house floor, Mace said that she had been raped at age 16 and while she opposes abortion, she thinks the government has no right to deny a victim of rape or incest access to abortion if they want that option.
Mace has been outspoken in criticizing states that have passed abortion bans without these exceptions after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. In an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” she said she disagreed with an abortion ban signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida, saying, “Signing a six-week ban that puts women who are victims of rape and girls who are victims of incest and in a hard spot isn’t the way to change hearts and minds. It’s not compassionate. The requirements [DeSantis] has for rape victims are too much, not something that I support. It’s a non-starter. I am a victim of rape. I was raped by a classmate at the age of 16. I am very wary, and the devil is always in the details, but we’ve got to show more care and concern and compassion for women who’ve been raped. I don’t like that this bill was signed in the dead of night.”
Nor is Mace stridently anti-LGBTQ. In 2021, the Washington Examiner wrote that Mace “is a supporter of both religious liberty and gay marriage.”
Mace told the Examiner, “I strongly support LGBTQ rights and equality. No one should be discriminated against.” While Mace opposed the Equality Act, she co-sponsored a Republican alternative called the Fairness for All Act.
Mace was one of only 31 Republicans to vote for the LGBTQ Business Equal Credit Enforcement and Investment Act. Mace was the sole Republican to sponsor H.R.5776 — Serving Our LGBTQ Veterans Act — legislation establishing a Center for LGBTQ Veterans within the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Among other functions, the center must serve as the department’s principal adviser on the adoption and implementation of policies and programs affecting veterans who are LGBTQ.
In July 2022, Mace was among 47 Republican representatives who voted in favor of the Respect for Marriage Act, which protects existing same-sex and interracial marriages under federal law. She later said, “If gay couples want to be as happily or miserably married as straight couples, more power to them. Trust me, I’ve tried it more than once.”
These facts of Nancy Mace’s legislative and personal history make her latest crusade all the more confounding. On Nov. 18, Mace introduced a resolution to ban trans people from using bathrooms other than those of their sex assigned at birth at the U.S. Capitol. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has since banned transgender people from using the bathrooms matching their gender identities.
“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,” Johnson said in a statement. “It is important to note that each Member office has its own private restroom, and unisex restrooms are available throughout the Capitol. Women deserve women’s only spaces.”
Mace’s resolution was, as she stated, to ban incoming Delaware representative Sarah McBride from using any bathroom facilities in the Capitol designated for women. Mace described McBride as a “biological man trying to force himself into women’s spaces” and as a “guy in a skirt.”
McBride is the first openly transgender person elected to Congress.
Mace’s 2024 House resolution would prevent McBride from even using “single-sex facilities.” H. RES. 1579 entitled, “Prohibiting Members, officers, and employees of the House from using single-sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex, and for other purposes.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said: “This is not just bigotry, this is just plain bullying.”
Mace has made this issue a veritable crusade, posting a video of herself on Twitter/X walking through the Capitol and talking about how she is being called an extremist when “she is a feminist” and that she will always fight for women and to preserve women’s spaces for women and from men. Mace said, “I’m gonna fight like hell to protect every woman and every little girl across this country to protect you and keep you safe.”
Mace argues that McBride’s presence in a women’s restroom would be an invasion of the privacy of women and girls and a threat to their well-being and safety.
On Nov. 19, Mace posted 126 times in 24 hours on Twitter/X about this. That’s not activism, it’s not feminism, it is obsession.
The New York Post reported Nov. 20 that Mace said she wasn’t going to stand for “someone with a penis in the women’s locker room.”
The Post also reported Mace told NewsNation’s “On Balance” late Tuesday night, “They are threatening to kill me over this. Men that want to use women’s restrooms are threatening to kill me over this issue.”
Mace told NewsNation, “This person wants to come in and use women’s spaces. If I’m in, as a woman, I’m changing clothes in the locker room because I use the gym when I’m up here in DC, the women’s gym, and a man shows up, and his genitalia, his penis is in the room, no! Like I’m not — it’s not OK.”
Mace said it would be a “trigger” for her as a rape survivor and victim of abuse. “I have PTSD from the abuse that I’ve suffered, and I’m gonna do everything I can to protect women and girls,” Mace said.
Since her appearance at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, McBride has been a rising star in the Democratic party. She’s a generous and compassionate person who is deeply committed to her legislative agenda for all Delawareans. That she won a landslide victory for Delaware’s sole congressional seat speaks to how broad her support is from her state and how little her being trans meant to voters.
Trans people have become an obsession for the GOP and Sarah McBride is just the latest focal point for that obsession. Nancy Mace seems poised to derail her personal legitimacy by posting so rabidly about this issue and trying to turn Sarah McBride — who has refused to take Mace’s bait — into some kind of villain.
Never mentioning Mace by name, McBride posted on Twitter/X, “Every day Americans go to work with people who have life journeys different than their own and engage with them respectfully, I hope members of Congress can muster that same kindness.”
She added, “This is a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing. We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars.”
In recent years, as PGN has reported, the GOP obsession with LGBTQ+ people has turned into legislative and civil-rights battles nationwide. From “Don’t Say Gay” laws to book bans to bathroom bans to fixation on “men in women’s sports,” Republicans are targeting queer and trans people rather than addressing issues of real concern to Americans.
This obsession was a defining factor in the recent election where Donald Trump’s campaign targeted Kamala Harris by stating “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
The history of bathroom segregation is long and ugly in America. It has been used to segregate and demean people for generations. This latest assault on Sarah McBride and trans people in general is a continuation of that grotesque history.
Mace is on the wrong side of history and humanity here, as are those supporting her. Whether she knows it or not, she’s been in women’s restrooms with trans women her whole life and it hasn’t harmed her. Trans women, like cis women, are just in the restroom to use it and leave. They don’t announce their gender identity when they come in.
What could trigger Mace and likely most women is if trans men began using women’s restrooms, as ordered by Mace’s resolution. In her haste to attack McBride, Mace never thought about the bearded butch trans men in the Capitol, now under an order to use the facilities of their birth sex. What happens when those trans men start using women’s restrooms?
Discrimination is ethically and morally wrong. This resolution must be quashed. There can be no “separate and unequal” in the Capitol.