The lonely, resolute path of Oklahoma legislator Mauree Turner

OKLAHOMA CITY — They’re a striking outlier on the floor of the Oklahoma House: the only masked face, the only hijab-covered head, in one of the reddest state capitols in the country.

Rep. Mauree Turner sits at their desk as other legislators chat and work the cavernous Greco-Roman chamber. Conversations hush as a chaplain appears to deliver the invocation on this early spring morning. Quoting Philippians and Jesus, he urges lawmakers to care for themselves so that they can best serve the people.

“At the end of the day, we’re human,” he says. “We have limited mental and emotional capacity.”

This is Turner’s dilemma.

Being the nation’s first Black, Muslim, nonbinary state lawmaker, let alone the first in Oklahoma, was never going to be easy. Turner realized that from the start. Yet it took time to grasp how isolating, debilitating and toxic the legislature would become for them. And how, one day, they would reach their limit.

“The whole place feels like wildfire,” Turner says.

Not just because of the threats that began after their election in 2020 and the nonstop misgendering by colleagues and staffers. The Republican House majority censured them in the aftermath of an LBGTQ protest. After winning reelection in 2022, they were moved to a windowless sixth-floor office, a former closet known as “the attic.” Two other novice Democrats of color were also located there.

In the face of all this, Turner remained resolute, even defiant. For their official head shot, they wore their lip ring, a paisley headscarf and mustard-yellow overalls. If they showed up in a sweatshirt, Republicans warned that their votes would be pulled for not adhering to the dress code. Turner, who is 31, jokes about being summoned by the principal. Much of the Capitol’s culture has felt like high school — petty and stifling.

Focusing on their reason for seeking elective office — to represent “our most marginalized Oklahomans” — has always helped. Even so, what has Turner really achieved for those communities? Have they been righteous or unrealistic in standing their ground, in holding to principle despite the cost?

There’s no getting around the fact that Turner has yet to write a single bill to make it out of committee. Their greatest victory has been working with Democrats and advocates to pressure Republican leaders not to consider certain measures, like the one that would have barred gender and sexual diversity training at public agencies.

Everyone is still expecting them to seek reelection. But Turner knows something others don’t.

They’ve already decided not to run.

They will remain vague when making the announcement in early April, simply citing health issues. They hesitate to share the truth with enemies who could use it against them. In this building, they’ve learned, even pity is a weapon.

“This place is so suffocating for someone like me,” Turner confides in the privacy of their office, where a portrait of trailblazing LGBTQ activist Marsha P. Johnson hangs. “It will rob you of everything you have.”

Turner came to Oklahoma City to work as a regional field director for the state ACLU. They stayed for the small-town feel, reminiscent of their hometown of rural Ardmore, a hundred miles south.

“I love Oklahoma in my bones,” Turner says.

The youngest of four, they spent childhood days at the Old Time Soda Pop Shop, where they drank Orange Crush and played the jukebox. On weekends, they skateboarded to church to sing in the choir and tagged along with their cowboy grandpa.

They decided they wanted to work with large exotic animals when they grew up. “Maybe the large exotic animals are the legislators,” Turner muses.

Though their neighborhood was diverse, it was not devoid of racism. They remember cleaning White classmates’ spit from a sister’s hair. Disciplined in first grade for some now-forgotten infraction, Turner went home and told their mother: “Today would have been so much better if I was White.”

In college, Turner started wearing a hijab and attending a mosque — embracing the faith of their father, who was in prison for much of their early years. At Oklahoma State University, after long camouflaging their body with baggy hoodies and gym shorts, Turner recognized they were nonbinary. They knew about the murders of young gay or transgender men such as Matthew Shepard in Wyoming and Brandon Teena in Nebraska, which led to a grim realization: Being themself in America’s heartland could get them killed.

“I think I’ve just kind of walked through life like that,” Turner said. “Like any day could be my day … if I wanted to be fully myself.”

The first hateful message was left shortly after Turner’s election to the District 88 House seat in Oklahoma City. The caller sounded like an elderly woman.

“I got a voice mail that was just like, ‘If you want to do that, you know, you go someplace else. We don’t do that here in Oklahoma,’” Turner says. “And I’m like, ‘Do what? We haven’t even done any work. I haven’t done anything other than be elected.’”

Similar voice mails, emails and letters followed. Turner slipped one of the handwritten letters under the glass of their office desk, assuming such missives were a rite of passage for Democrats in a deep-red state. Rep. Monroe Nichols of Tulsa, then vice chair of the seven-member Black Caucus, clued them in during a retreat: The messages weren’t typical.

Still, Turner was hopeful. On the Criminal Justice and Corrections Committee, they submitted their first bill, a relatively noncontroversial measure to standardize police hiring practices statewide.

The committee’s chairman, Republican Rep. Justin J.J. Humphrey, a cattle rancher, former probation officer and church worship leader, handed the bill back with a note scrawled across it: “Kill.”

This also was not typical, Turner would learn later.

Humphrey doesn’t recall writing the message. He worked with Turner to improve a bill to decriminalize HIV/AIDS, he says, ultimately granting it a hearing. It was the only committee hearing Turner would ever get.

“I respect her backbone to stand for causes she believes in, but I feel she wasted her time and talents making every issue about sex and gender,” he wrote in a recent email that repeatedly misgendered Turner as a “WOMAN.” He added, “I don’t believe she was effective for any cause because of her approach.”

Again and again, Turner’s “otherness” was glaring — and lonely.

Their relationship with fellow Democrats would never warm. Turner’s 2020 election followed a surprise primary upset of an establishment candidate who had far outraised them, a local sociology professor, real estate agent and father of two.

Rep. Jacob Rosecrants, a Democrat from Norman, blamed the incumbent: “He ignored the community.” Turner, by contrast, “represented true grass roots, not really caring about raising too much money but being there for people in the district.”

Interactions with traditional Muslim groups also were strained at times, with Turner wishing for greater support or recognition and suspecting it didn’t come because they were queer. From around the world, though, young Muslims reached out in the wake of the election — to explain that they, too, were queer or used different pronouns.

At the state’s Council on American-Islamic Relations, where Turner had risen from unpaid intern to board member, the executive director says numerous articles about Turner’s historic win were shared with members. He described their departure from the board as amicable, a mutual decision given all a new lawmaker would have ahead.

Turner recalls being asked to step down: “I was never going to get them to accept me.”

Now about that censure.

It happened last year as the legislature debated a bill to ban gender-affirming care. During a protest at the Capitol, an LGBTQ activist was accused of assaulting a Republican lawmaker and a state trooper in the rotunda. Some protesters sought out Turner’s office.

State police accused Turner of not initially allowing officers in to question a person involved in the incident. Republicans introduced a resolution to censure Turner and strip them of committee assignments until they apologized for what House Speaker Charles McCall described as “harboring a fugitive and repeatedly lying to officers.” McCall said the representative had abused their position to “thwart attempts by law enforcement to make contact with a suspect.”

Republicans voted to limit debate to a few minutes by the resolution’s sponsor, the Democratic minority leader and Turner.

“I know that I represent a culmination of things that you all deeply hate,” Turner said during their allotted time, reminding colleagues of the threats they’d faced and appealing to a common humanity. “People do not feel represented or protected by the people in this body. They come to find refuge in my office. They come to decompress from some of the most stressful times. And I understand, because I do it, too.”

The resolution passed along party lines by a vote of 81-19.

Turner refused to yield. “An apology for loving the people of Oklahoma is something that I cannot do,” they declared at a news conference afterward, appearing resolute.

Internally, they were cratering. They’d already been having intermittent panic attacks. Now migraines recurred. Turner woke one morning with no vision in their left eye. Another morning, it was their right eye. A doctor ordered tests.

A deep depression descended. It felt exhausting, “gut-wrenching” to work with Democrats who Turner thought had done little to fight back after the censure. Turner celebrated simply surviving, telling themself: “One catastrophe at a time, please.” They relished the job of aiding constituents, whether with food stamps, unemployment compensation or other needs.

Time away from the Capitol was sweet relief, especially since they had started dating. And home, with the young nephew Turner is raising, was replete with domestic distractions like day-care pickup and grocery shopping.

Those bills they had once proposed to standardize hiring practices for police statewide and decriminalize HIV/AIDS? Turner hoped to get them moving when 2024 arrived.

But in early February, a 16-year-old died a day after a bathroom fight in their public school in a Tulsa suburb. Relatives said Nex Benedict had been bullied for being transgender. The student’s death was later ruled a suicide.

On the House floor, Turner stood to address the death, voice shaking: “We lost a student far too soon in Oklahoma. And that happens often, that the rhetoric and the fuel is some of the things we do here.”

They asked for a moment of silence. Some lawmakers kept talking.

In the ensuing weeks, the legislature passed an anti-trans bill defining an individual’s sex as the one assigned at birth. Turner voted against it and a slew of other measures — turning possession of abortion pills into drug trafficking, for instance, and allowing police to fine and jail undocumented immigrants. All sailed through by large, partisan margins. Despite vocal opposition, Turner felt somehow complicit in the “horrible onslaught” of attacks on vulnerable communities.

On a cloudy day in March, they emerged from the Capitol to join scores of LGBTQ protesters. A tornado warning had been issued, but that wasn’t the primary concern of those marching around the building, chanting and toting signs that demanded “Justice for Nex.”

A couple from Oklahoma City approached Turner afterward. One wore a necklace saying “Ask me my pronouns.”

“I appreciate you,” the other said. “Even though you’re not our rep, you represent us. You are Oklahoma.”

An organizer from the advocacy group Rural Oklahoma Pride followed.

“I know that you’re carrying a lot of the load. There’s got to be a lot of tense moments in there,” he said, the Capitol looming behind him. “Within this community, we fully back you.”

Turner listened, nodded, then climbed the steps to greet the crowd. Oklahoma’s is the only state capitol surrounded by active oil rigs, its rotunda inscribed with the names of oil companies that helped to construct it and backed those in power.

“I can’t stress enough that our liberation will not come from policy in this building,” Turner told protesters to cheers and applause. “Our community care and preservation will not come from policy in this building.”

“Preach!” someone yelled.

“You know the days when it’s hard to wake up and get out of bed?” Turner continued. “So many of us probably see ourselves in Nex. I know I do. So I think it’s really important to remember that even on our roughest days at the Oklahoma legislature, we have community that holds us and keeps us safe.”

The crowd shouted, “Who keeps us safe?”

“We do!”

Turner’s medical tests this spring delivered a devastating double diagnosis: multiple sclerosis and cancer.

“My body has betrayed me again,” they thought. They had to quickly make peace with leaving the legislature. “These people are not my family. House District 88, that’s my family.”

After Turner’s news release about stepping down, Nichols was one of the few colleagues to post praise about their historic election, how they overcame “unprecedented resistance.”

“Some who never really felt seen in Oklahoma saw themselves reflected for the first time in the halls of power,” he wrote.

Turner’s news didn’t surprise Rosecrants. He chalked it up to stress, which he understands viscerally. Last year, his teenage son came out to him as transgender. Turner helped the lawmaker grapple with the fallout of becoming a vocal ally.

“There’s a feeling that they needed to stay for the representation. But how much more can you take?” he asks.

The final week of the 2024 session was no less draining. The House debated a “trans erasure” bill that would define gender in biological terms, with the measure’s Republican author arguing that it would protect women against a “degradation” of their rights, “helping to preserve single-sex spaces that are important for privacy, safety and equal opportunity.”

A vote in favor, Turner countered, would be a direct assault on people like them: “You can attack us with words and a policy you really poorly create, but that won’t change the fact that your attempts are harmful …”

The measure passed 79-17.

Turner hasn’t publicly discussed plans for the future. They continue to keep most details about their health private.

The Democratic primary for the District 88 seat is Tuesday. Turner is supporting a bid by their legislative aide, Nicole Maldonado, a queer Colombian immigrant of 24. She is facing two challengers, both White candidates.

Turner recently accompanied Maldonado to a pro-Palestinian fundraising dinner for Oklahomans Against Occupation. As the candidate worked the room in a hot-pink suit, Turner took a seat at an empty table with their nephew. No one joined the pair.

A Black Muslim businessman running for city council did come over to say hello and acknowledged Turner as he began speaking to attendees. There was polite applause. Turner didn’t stay very long.

These years in office have been “the most isolating of my life,” they admit.

Turner has come to believe that representation doesn’t necessarily mean acceptance, and it certainly doesn’t mean compromising your values to pass legislation.

Perhaps the most significant part of their legacy will be how they stood their ground and claimed space even when it hurt. As Turner says: “People got to see themselves on this House floor in this legislature. … They felt seen. They felt heard. They felt cared for. They felt valued. Like their life mattered, their story mattered.”

Surely there are other ways to serve, Turner has decided. Maybe as a community organizer.

While grocery shopping at a Walmart in the district, they had an elderly White woman in a sparkly red blouse walk over with her husband.

“Are you Mauree?”

The legislator tensed, unsure of what was coming.

“We’re sad to see you go,” the woman said. “But we’re so grateful that you represented us for as long as you did. This is where you belong.”