Zooey Zephyr’s Defense of Trans Lives in a Deep-Red State

Early last year, on a slushy predawn morning, I drove to the Montana state capitol building, in Helena, to see the legislature in action. The body is made up of a hundred and fifty “citizen legislators” who meet for no more than ninety days every other year, a schedule designed to accommodate their other, full-time jobs. The session has been described to me as a gathering of friends—there are only a million or so people in the state—or at least it felt that way, for a time. What I witnessed on the floor of the House of Representatives, against the literal backdrop of an enormous settlers-meet-Indians mural, was considerably more tense.

I had come to report on battles over L.G.B.T.Q.-oriented books in a local library system—a small front in the culture wars spreading across the state and the country. Montana’s bicameral Republican super-majority was pushing bills that criminalized the distribution of “obscene materials” by public-school employees, prohibited drag shows in public libraries and schools, and exempted public-school students from having to call classmates by their preferred names or pronouns. Another bill sought to bar medical providers from treating trans minors with hormones or gender-affirming surgeries, which some Republicans referred to as “amputation.” “I wouldn’t call that health care,” the House speaker, Matt Regier, whose sister and father were also members of the legislature, told me in an interview at the time. At the start of the session, the Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, had preëmptively requested 2.6 million dollars to cover the expected cost of defending the state against lawsuits by civil-liberties groups.

The day I visited, legislators were debating the names-and-pronouns bill. Zooey Zephyr, a Democrat and a trans woman representing Missoula, and one of two trans or nonbinary members of the House, called it “inherently discriminatory” and tantamount to bullying. In the following weeks, she continued to speak during floor debate, rising from her seat, No. 31, with increasing fervor. When, in April, the legislature took up Senate Bill 99, the one concerning medical care for trans minors, Zephyr said to its proponents, “If you vote yes on this bill, and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.” She quickly became a national symbol of L.G.B.T.Q. resistance.

Regier responded by refusing to give her the floor unless she apologized. Protesters showed up a few days later to yell “Let her speak”; seven were arrested. House members then voted to bar Zephyr from the chamber for the remainder of the legislative session. As the New Yorker contributor Abe Streep wrote, it was “the latest in a string of incidents involving Republican-controlled legislatures muzzling elected Democratic colleagues. In Tennessee, legislators expelled Black representatives speaking about gun control; in Nebraska, a Democrat who testified against a bill similar to S.B. 99, and who has a transgender child, was investigated for having a conflict of interest.”

Zephyr’s journey through the final weeks of the 2023 legislative session is the subject of “Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr,” a short documentary by Kimberly Reed, herself a trans woman from Montana. I first encountered Reed through her feature-length film “Dark Money” (released after a book of the same title by my colleague Jane Mayer), which examines the impact of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. F.E.C. on campaign finance, journalism, and public accountability in Montana. More recently, Reed directed an episode of the miniseries “Equal” (now on Max) that’s in part about the trans Montanan Jack Starr, who, between the nineteen-twenties and forties, was repeatedly arrested for dressing as a dapper frontiersman. In Zephyr, Reed identified a similarly courageous figure. “It was clear Montana was turning redder, Trumpier, scarier,” Reed told me. “The political backslapping, the ‘aw, shucks,’ still-have-drinks-at-the-end-of-the-day thing was really eroding.”

As a matter of politics, “Seat 31” tells a gloomy tale: S.B. 99 gets passed, and Zephyr is forced to finish out the session from a bench next to the tiny statehouse snack bar. Yet Reed’s character study manages to show Zephyr’s sense of humor—and faith in the eventual triumph of Montanans’ live-and-let-live attitude. When Zephyr is relegated to the bench, she jokes, “Finally, transparency in government! Open doors!” When the session concludes, she clears out the seat she was barred from and chats cordially with a few fellow-legislators. A sweet, personal moment arrives soon afterward, when Zephyr and her long-distance girlfriend, the trans journalist Erin Reed, take the stage at Missoula’s Queer Prom.

Zephyr is running for reëlection this fall, as is the Democrat SJ Howell, who represents a neighboring district in Missoula and identifies as trans and nonbinary. The two are minorities within a super-minority—but they’ll likely be back at the statehouse in 2025. ♦