She was censored over trans rights. But lawmaker Zooey Zephyr won’t be silenced
Zooey Zephyr had just arrived on the outskirts of far-flung Libby, Montana, this summer when a text message came through with a warning. There were anti-LGBTQ+ protesters at the Pride celebration that was already under way on the banks of the Kootenai River.
Calm and steady, she pulled her white rental sedan into the lot and brought it to a stop. Instead of protesters, the car was immediately thronged by a cluster of fans. One, a middle-aged woman with long, wavy brown hair cascading from under a bedazzled baseball cap, asked Zephyr with urgency: “Do you remember me?”
Later that afternoon, the woman who approached Zephyr took to the Pride stage to tell her story.
She had feared coming out as transgender for years in this small, conservative town, but finally got the courage to do so when she witnessed Zephyr, 35, a Democratic state representative from Missoula, stand up to a legislative body controlled by Republicans hellbent on silencing her and driving her out of the state capitol where she was elected to serve. Seeing another trans woman refuse to be silenced gave her the power to live her own truth.
This is what it’s like traveling with Zephyr – even to a remote, Republicancontrolled corner of the massive state where she was born and raised. Montanans from all walks of life – many of whom have been cast aside and told their lives and politics don’t matter and won’t be heard – show up to tell her their stories and look for some hope in return.
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There is the fantasy of Montana that gets too much national attention, fawning stories of pristine public lands, macho cowboys and sprawling ranches. Amid rapid gentrification, those relics are all becoming figments of the collective American imagination.
And then there is truly remote, rural
Montana, the barely mentioned places like Libby. This community of fewer than 3,000 sits on the lush curves of a river beneath the Cabinet mountains in the north-west corner of the state, closer in place and conservative politics to north Idaho and eastern Washington than any major city in Montana.
It’s a former asbestos mining town, one that voted Democratic for decades. It weathered a huge industrial poisoning scandal linked to the mine in the 1990s and early 2000s, which killed nearly 700 residents over the years. It’s a place beaten up by extractive corporate interests and nearly forgotten. But this year’s Pride celebration, one of the first organizers have ever pulled off, was vibrant, joyous and filled with dozens of supporters. (It was smaller than last year’s event, the organizers say, and they fear that was due to the wave of anti-queer and anti-trans rhetoric that has flooded Montana and other parts of rural America.)
The protesters Zephyr was warned about, a cluster of angry-looking white men, were there, walking menacingly through the crowd. One carried a placard that read: “If you’re looking for a sign to kill yourself, this is it.” No one paid them much attention.
I ask Zephyr what she would have done if confronted by the protesters. She smiled and said without missing a beat: “What do you think I’d do? I’d talk with them.”
We’ve spent enough hours together now that I know she’s serious.
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Zephyr has become a symbol of graceful defiance in a state recently flooded with hate-riddled speech and politics. But how did she – a gamer, an elite wrestler as a child and later a dance instructor – become one of Time magazine’s “100 Next”, leaders