Zephyr Barred from Legislature for Remainder of Session

The Montana House of Representatives on Wednesday afternoon voted to bar Rep. Zooey Zephyr, D-Missoula, the first openly transgender woman in the state Legislature, from the House floor for the remainder of the 68th Legislative Session, citing what they described as Zephyr’s encouragement of a protest in the House gallery on Monday afternoon.

Per the motion, which passed on a party-line vote, Zephyr will be permitted to vote on legislation remotely, but will not be allowed to enter the House floor, anteroom or gallery until the session concludes in the coming weeks. 

In testimony on the House floor on Wednesday afternoon, Republican legislators characterized Zephyr’s actions as disruptive and dangerous to the body, and charged the representative with violating House rules. Democrats — including Zephyr herself — pointed to what they described as hypocrisy by the Republican caucus, continued attacks on LGBTQ Montanans and infringements on protected free speech. 

The vote by the House was the culmination of a multi-day standoff between Zephyr and House Republicans, who charged the representative with breaching decorum after she spoke on the House floor last week in opposition to Senate Bill 99, a bill that would ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors in the state of Montana. The bill — introduced by Sen. John Fuller, R-Kalispell — has passed both chambers of the Legislature despite garnering extensive opposition from medical providers, civil rights activists, educators and transgender Montanans during multiple hearings. Zephyr during an April 18 reading of Senate Bill 99 told Republican legislators that they would “see the blood on [their] hands” if they voted to pass the bill, after which Speaker of the House Rep. Matt Regier, R-Kalispell, refused to recognize Zephyr on the House floor for three consecutive days.   

Supporters of Zephyr disrupted a session of the House of Representatives on Monday after Regier refused to allow the representative to speak during consideration of a bill that would restrict when minors in Montana can change their preferred name and pronouns in school. As law enforcement forcibly removed protesters from the House gallery, the demonstrators voiced their support for Zephyr, shouting “Let her speak,” and “Whose house? Our House.” During the protest, Zephyr did not clear the floor as instructed by the Speaker, and rather stood on the House floor, holding her microphone in the air. 

Law enforcement charged seven protesters with criminal trespassing on Monday, and the House cancelled a floor session yesterday, postponing consideration of approximately 50 bills with less than two weeks left in the legislative session. 

During Wednesday’s House floor session, Majority Leader Rep. Sue Vinton, R-Billings, brought the motion to discipline Zephyr, saying that the representative “clearly violated the rules, collective rights, safety, integrity and decorum” of the body. 

Republican legislators who spoke in support of the motion echoed Vinton’s charges against Zephyr, characterizing the demonstration on Monday as a danger to the body and emphasizing Zephyr’s breach of House rules. 

“This behavior violated the collective rights and safety of 99 other members of this body, our staff, our pages and the public,” Rep. Casey Knudsen, R-Malta, said. 

Rep. David Bedey, R-Hamilton, argued that Zephyr had incited “the disruptive antics of demonstrators” and called the protest “an assault on our representative democracy.” Bedey denied claims by Democrats that the protest and subsequent censure of Zephyr were at all related to the oppression of LGBTQ Montanans or issues of free speech. 

In an impassioned rebuke of her censure, Zephyr spoke to both her legislative responsibilities and her experience as a transgender woman in a governing body that has considered a number of bills that would impact LGBTQ Montanans. 

“This legislature has systematically attacked [the LGBTQ] community,” Zephyr said. “We have seen bills targeting our art forms, our books, our history and our healthcare, and I rose up in defense of my community.”

Zephyr testified that she had spoken to a family whose transgender teenager had attempted suicide while watching a House Judiciary Committee hearing on “one of the anti-trans bills.”

“When I rose up and said, ‘There is blood on your hands,’ I was not being hyperbolic. I was speaking to the real consequences of the votes that we as legislators take in this body,” Zephyr said on the House floor. 

Zephyr also spoke about the Monday afternoon protest, characterizing it as a part of a functioning democracy in the wake of her censure, which effectively silenced her 11,000 constituents. 

“When the Speaker gaveled down the people demanding that democracy work, demanding that their representative be heard, when he gaveled down, what he was doing was driving a nail in the coffin of democracy. But you cannot kill democracy that easily,” Zephyr said. “That is why they kept chanting ‘Let her speak,’ and why I raised my microphone to amplify their voices, to make sure that the people who elected me here are heard.” 

Democratic colleagues of Zephyr voiced support for the censured representative, calling the motion a hypocritical move by House Republicans. 

Rep. Jonathan Windy Boy, D-Box Elder, recalled breaches of decorum in his more than 20 years in the Montana Legislature, citing instances where physical altercations broke out between legislators, and where Democrats banged on furniture in protest, but were not disciplined. 

“Why weren’t we disciplined at that time?” Windy Boy said. “We are picking one person in this body for something she believes is right.”

“I will remind folks that the right to protest, and in fact, the right to protest against the government, is a clearly held right,” Rep. SJ Howell, D-Missoula, a nonbinary member of the Legislature, said, telling the body that they had “one shot to right this ship, and it’s this vote.”

Howell spoke to personal experiences with discrimination in the statehouse in the midst of a session where bills pertaining to the LGBTQ community have garnered considerable attention. 

“It’s not just one of our own has been silenced, its that that’s happened after a session of debating bills that only impact some of us, and struggling to fight for equal treatment under the law,” Howell said. “I have faced a series of offensive behaviors and offensive actions. There are people in this room that have said things about me in the press and online that I find deeply offensive.”

“Not one Democrat brought any of those bills. We did not go to look for that fight. But when it came to us, we did what we had to do. We did our job. We stood up. We stood with our community. We told the truths that we live every day. We hoped that you would listen. That is our job,” the representative added. 

In a press conference following the vote, Regier called the decision fair and reasonable, and chastised the media for implying “extracurricular reasons” for the censure of Zephyr.

“I did not know what was going to happen moving forward with that representative, if there was going to be more threats to just even safety, like I said, the staff and pages and sergeants, the clerks. That should not be in question when they come to work, and it was in question if that representative was staying on the floor,” Regier said.