On Monday, April 24th, a group of supporters from Missoula streamed into the House gallery. Hours after Zephyr’s comment, a group of hard-right legislators called the Freedom Caucus requested that Zephyr be disciplined for what it called “hateful rhetoric.” Matt Regier, the House speaker, demanded that she apologize and refused to acknowledge her during bill debates. She swept her gaze across the aisle, then responded, in a crisp, clipped voice, “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 is tall and lean, with pin-straight brown hair in a room full of Father’s Day ties, she stood apart in a flame-colored dress. The majority leader, Sue Vinton, objected, “We will not be shamed by anyone in this caucus.” The day before the debate, Montana’s governor, Greg Gianforte, had presented a letter to the legislature proposing to amend the bill such that it more clearly articulated “the necessarily binary definitions of ‘male’ and ‘female.’ ” (He referred to gender-affirming care as “Orwellian newspeak.”) On the floor, SJ Howell, a transgender Democrat from Missoula, said, “The governor’s amendments make clear that we are very specifically targeting a very small set of Montana kids, without regard for the specific context of those kids’ needs, the specific rights of those kids’ parents, and the specific advice of those kids’ doctors.” Zephyr, who is also transgender, gave impassioned remarks about the gruelling psychological consequences of such a prohibition. “Taking away this care will, without a doubt, harm kids.” “Major medical organizations throughout the country are unified in recognizing the strong, cohesive evidence that appropriate gender-affirming care improves health,” Lauren Wilson, the president of the state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, wrote in an op-ed. The legislation has been roundly opposed by Montana’s medical establishment. On April 18th, Zooey Zephyr, a Democratic representative from Missoula, stood to speak against Senate Bill 99, which would prohibit transgender minors-and their parents and doctors-from pursuing a range of medical treatments, including hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and gender-affirming surgery. “That’s the thing that had to happen.” Bob Brown, a Republican who was elected to the legislature in the nineteen-seventies and went on to serve for more than two decades, recalled once seeing a lawyer crawl across desks on the House floor to try to throttle a representative who was sympathetic to a power company.īut this session marks the first instance since Whiteside’s ouster, a hundred and twenty-four years ago, that the Montana legislature has endeavored so intently to silence one of its own representatives. “I was sincere about doing some good,” he said later. In 1957, a Democratic legislator named Jake Frank brawled with two members of his Party whom he viewed as beholden to corporate mining interests. The Montana state legislature, like many of its counterparts, has a long history of indecorous behavior. (Clark went on to serve a single, ignoble term in the Senate later, Mark Twain described him as a “shame to the American nation.”) “Have the people of this state gone mad?” Whiteside proclaimed, “or is it I who have gone insane?” His colleagues promptly ousted him. Lawmakers watched as the House secretary produced a stack of sealed white envelopes and began to extract a series of crisp thousand-dollar bills, for a total sum of thirty thousand dollars. Ten days later, with the lobbies of the statehouse so packed that crowds extended far into the street, Whiteside stood on the House floor and announced that he had gathered hard evidence of Clark’s scheme. Whiteside had heard rumors that William Andrews Clark, Sr., a mining baron who lived in a thirty-four-room mansion with frescoed ceilings, was offering lavish bribes to legislators in a bid for the U.S. ![]() On the eve of Montana’s sixth legislative session, in 1899, a freshly elected state senator named Frank Whiteside arrived in Helena to find a capital awash in money.
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