A few weeks ago, I volunteered at a dance for LGBTQ+ teens. About a half hour before the event started, I gathered all of the adult volunteers to have “the talk.” I wasn’t worried about this large group of teenagers misbehaving, vaping in the bathroom, or wandering into unauthorized areas of the building. That’s not what we needed to talk about.
Instead, I pointed to our possible escape routes. I showed them the exits and reminded them to always try to flee first. If you can’t flee, find a place to hide. I walked them to each closet, and showed them which doors were unlocked. I placed tables and garbage cans in front of the locked doors, hoping folks would instinctively avoid these instead of running into a dead end. We talked about how to barricade the doors, and what to grab if they had to fight.
This year, we tripled the number of adult chaperones, not because I expected more kids to attend or the kids needed more supervision. This year was different because we are less safe than ever before. The Montana Legislature has made it that way.
Anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric embraced by the Republican supermajority is resulting in real violence against us. Recently, a Great Falls woman was intentionally struck and pinned against a building. The motive for this attempted murder? Her gender identity. With this violence in mind, we had adults at every door, every exit, every elevator, in the hopes that if someone came to hurt us, we’d stop them before they got to the children.
In the days after the dance, friends casually asked, “How did prom go?” And my response?
“The kids had fun and no one tried to kill us.”
No one tried to kill us this time. No one tried to kill us today. But to be clear, they are trying to kill us. They’re doing so by inciting violence against us – with their words and with their laws.
I’ve worked on LGBTQ+ teen suicide prevention efforts for the past several years. That’s mostly done by hosting social events for these kids. We eat pizza and play Mario Kart. If one of the kids is having a problem, we talk about solutions. These can be things like, “Johnny is getting bullied at lunch. Who else has this lunch period? Let’s make sure Johnny has some friends to sit with.”
The alarmingly simple truth is that queer kids need what straight kids need, too, – support from their peers and the adults in their lives. In fact, one supportive adult can make a life-or-death difference for an LGBTQ+ teen.
Sometimes the support they need is in the form of medical care. Gender affirming care can look like many things. For minors, it is often in the form of puberty blockers. The safety of puberty blockers has been well documented, and need not be re-hashed here. Gender affirming care itself has a regret rate of around 1%, which is astoundingly low. A patient is more likely to regret a knee replacement than they are gender affirming care. There is no medical reason to restrict this type of care, and contrary claims made by the Montana GOP are not backed by medical science in any way. Medical decisions should be made by the child, parent, and medical professionals involved. The Montana legislature has no place in making those decisions.
Every 45 seconds, an LBGTQ+ child attempts suicide. Without support, both familial, social, and medical, many LGBTQ+ kids don’t live to adulthood. Luckily, we know how to make these numbers go down. Combine that one supportive adult with appropriate medical care and more kids will live. Research shows that providing gender affirming care significantly reduces rates of suicide and depression. Take away that care, and you’ll have a state full of tiny coffins from kids who died begging for our help.
I’ve spent my fair share of nights sitting in the emergency room with scared parents and kids who don’t see a future where they can just be themselves. So, when I read that House Speaker Matt Reiger claims that Rep. Zooey Zephyr was using “violent rhetoric,” I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry.
As the entire country now knows, Rep. Zephyr was speaking against a law that would deny gender affirming care to minors, when she told lawmakers they would have “blood on their hands.” This turn of phrase is both wholly accurate and in no way a threat. Republicans, who are actively making me less safe, are now pretending to be victims and hiding under the guise of “decorum.” Yet, Reiger issued no such condemnation of poor decorum to the Montana Freedom Caucus when they intentionally and repeatedly misgendered Zephyr. (As did Great Falls’ own Senator Jeremy Trebas). Apparently rules only apply when you’ve made a Republican feel a shred of accountability for the harm they’re causing.
As Republicans spew vitriol against Queer people, kids are listening. Already, Montana’s anti-LGBTQ+agenda has resulted in queer kids trying to kill themselves. When SB 99 is signed into law, more LGBTQ+ children are going to die. People like Matt Reiger and Great Falls’ own Steven Galloway are denying them life-saving medical care, and inciting violence against the LGBTQ+ community. Montana Republicans have made themselves clear – they’d prefer a dead queer child to a living one.
Imagine having the gall to pass these devastating, discriminatory laws and then acting like a victim when someone calls you to account for it. This rings particularly hollow when I’ve just shown a group of adults where to hide the children should some bigot come try to shoot us. Be it inciting their constituents to violence or denying children medical care, Republicans will have us bleeding out in a closet.
When Rep. Zephyr says that the Montana GOP will have blood on their hands, she’s telling the truth.
By now we all know that Republican House Speaker Matt Reiger is putting Montana on the map by silencing Democratic Representative Zooey Zephyr for her plea to vote no on SB 99 on the House floor last week.
Let’s talk about SB 99 , the bill with a short title called, “Provide for a youth health protection act,” which I find rather ironic. Did the bill’s sponsor, Senator John Fuller, intentionally give this bill a name that does not correlate to its identity?
This bill does not protect transgender youth, but instead prohibits gender affirming care by medical professionals who treat minors for gender dysphoria by criminalizing health care professionals and prohibiting professional liability via insurance. Can you see the physicians leaving the state yet?
For a lot of reasons, I do not support this bill, but, most significantly, because I have a transgender nephew. It was a very painful process for my entire family, especially my nephew, to go through this transition. It wasn’t painful because my nephew was confused, it was painful in terms that we all had to learn a new way— new terms, a new person, a new appearance. We had to learn a new way to love and support my nephew, who fortunately, was given a gender-neutral name at birth, so that was one constant. It wasn’t as simple as checking a box, or waking up one morning and deciding that he was a boy. It was a process riddled with mistakes, despite lots of healthcare professional support.
I know my family’s experience was easy compared to what many other Montana families experience. My nephew grew up in San Diego where my brother lives, so, as you can imagine, the access to exceptional medical care that comes with a metropolitan city was readily available. The medical community was well prepared to walk us through the transition and provide family resources. And, my brother has excellent health insurance. Many transgender Montanans do not have decent insurance–especially with legislation aimed at erasing them. We were fortunate.
In our case, we made it a priority to hold an open-mind and go through this as an accepting and loving family—even when it seemed sort of crazy. Yes, it is weird to change pronouns. I remember asking my sister-in-law, “so now I can’t say niece, what do I say?” She effortlessly said, “Just say my brother’s oldest kid, leave the gender out.” That was before we learned the term “nibling.”
The awkwardness lasts a very short time and the new normal takes over, and you don’t even notice anymore. It just takes effort and, let me tell you, we fumbled and fucked up, but we were able to laugh at ourselves and be honest. I believe it has brought our family closer together because this experience showed us what is truly important—life, love, and the unconditional support of one another. The right to live and let live.
The Republican legislators in this body do not care how many lives are at stake by passing this bill. Not even a heartbreaking letter from an ER physician was enough to convince our Christian Montana governor to reconsider his deplorable position. The letter details the sad case of one Montana trans youth brought in after a failed suicide attempt, and who attributed their hopelessness to “my state doesn’t want me.”
My nephew was required to go through YEARS of therapy (with a licensed physician specializing in gender affirming care) and, only when it was determined that my nephew would absolutely benefit from different therapeutic interventions, were options offered. It wasn’t simply a primary care doctor and some prescriptions handed out. It was methodical, yet fluid, and the plan changed as new things developed. Only years after THAT was my nephew able to have “top surgery” – another term we had to learn, to have his breasts removed.
Gratefully, my nephew is now engaged to his life partner, and doing all the normal things that couples do. He has a job he loves and is living a full life in a community and family that honors and respects his life.
Transgender, nonbinary, and gender diversity is not something that citizens should meddle into, much less lawmakers. It should be left to the individuals, families, and medical professionals going through this experience. It has been painful, and provocative, to listen to some of the legislators testify so brazenly about a very sensitive, serious, personal issue. If the Governor, the Freedom Caucus, and the state Republicans (Glimm, Gist, Galloway, Sheldon-Galloway, Emrich, and McKamey) truly want to protect trans youth and LGBTQ+ kids as they claim, then they should take action to support Gender Health programs in the state. They could introduce legislation to study the needs of the LGBTQ+ and trans people, they could invite and encourage trained, compassionate physicians, social workers, mental health professionals and others to increase access for this specific group of individuals who deserve quality healthcare like ALL MONTANANS. Full-spectrum healthcare is not asking for too much!
Last Friday SB 99 was transmitted to Governor Gianforte to be signed into law, and, if signed, we can no longer refer to ourselves as the Last Best Place.
This past week, I received a sickening postcard from Great Falls Republican Representative Lola Sheldon-Galloway. I’m assuming her message was in response to public comment I sent to the legislature about their continued attacks on LBGTQ+ Montanans. You can see an image of the bigoted, disturbing shit she is telling Montanans here:
In her postcard message, Lola stated, “In our confusing WOKE Culture defining sex is necessary to clarify GOD’S Truth – GOD created male + female in HIS IMAGE! I will continue to STAND for this ETERNAL TRUTH!”
Good grief, who are we letting create the laws in our state?
I’m not going to dive deeply into the logical fallacies of Lola’s statement. But I will point out that those are her personal religious beliefs, not eternal truths. “Christians” like Lola Sheldon-Galloway are openly comfortable claiming that they have a biblical mandate to occupy and control secular institutions. (Ironically, many evangelicals do not consider Lola Sheldon Galloway and her husband Steven to be Christian because they are Mormons. A fact that is apparently completely lost on the Galloways as they claim to represent the Christian perspective.)
Besides her evidenced lack of scientific knowledge, Lola apparently also lacks basic knowledge of our government’s founding principles. Because of their overt worship of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, I assume Republicans are also aware of our First Amendment.
The First Amendment prohibits the government from “establishing” a religion and protects citizens’ right to practice their religion as they please. The United States was founded as a SECULAR nation. That means the separation of church and state is fundamental to our nation.
But our GOP-majority State Legislature and Republican Governor Greg Gianforte don’t give a shit about your religious beliefs if they aren’t in line with their White Christian Nationalism.
How is the religious extremism of our GOP government impacting Montana?
One way is via the Republican majority’s attacks on LGBTQ+ Montanans. Our Republican “leaders” have pursued a slate of anti- LGBTQ+ bills throughout this legislative session. When their relentless, hate-filled bills were called out for the death sentence they are to LGBTQ+ children, Republicans silenced their colleague Representative Zooey Zephyr.The Republican Speaker of the House has refused to let Representative Zephyr speak on the floor until she apologizes for her correct assessment of the harmful impacts of their hate. Representative Zephyr is a trans woman, which is relevant because of how her bullies are acting. In their public comments, numerous Republicans have misgendered her just to emphasize their cruel bigotry.
What is up with the Montana GOP’s slate of hate-filled anti-LGBTQ+ bills?
Sadly, many of these bills are close to being signed into law by our equally extreme governor. Our Great Falls legislators are doing nothing to slow these attacks. Instead they are all voting FOR this hate over and over again. Several active bills attacking LGBTQ+ Montanans are listed below.
These are shameful days for our state. Goodbye Montanan attitude of “live and let live.” Not any more. Not when representatives like Lola Sheldon-Galloway feel emboldened to let their religious beliefs lead their legislative actions.
While Cascade County residents are watching in horror the complete trainwreck of elections under newly elected Clerk and Recorder Sandra Merchant, how are things going in the Montana Legislature?
First the good news.
Ha! I kid, there is no good news. We elected clowns so now we get clownery.
Ok, fine I take that back. There is some good news. A big thank you to the people speaking up and testifying against hateful legislation. Democrats and members of the public are still pointing out illegal and thoughtless aspects of these bills. I’m thankful that people are trying to defend Montana’s citizens from our extremist Republicans legislators.
The latest stupidity from our Great Falls Legislators
The good news is that thanks to the efforts of passionate testimony, we have managed to reject some ultra stupid bills by Great Falls legislators. Like SB 235 by Senator Daniel Emrich — an effort to ban teachers from teaching scientific theory and SB 497 by Senator Steve Fitzpatrick — an effort to destroy stream access for Montana anglers. Buh-bye bad bills.
Well. I’m sorry. It continues to be very bad. Shocking no one, Republicans continue to attack abortion rights, LGBTQ rights and pass bills to benefit the uber rich.
I can’t list all of the bad bills here, so I’ll just mention some of the worst and point out where our Great Falls delegation is failing us.
Abortion Rights
Great Falls Representative Lola Sheldon Galloway, our local delegation’s best handmaiden to the patriarchy, has two disgusting bills to highlight. The bills both passed out of committee based solely on Republican votes. HB 937 forces more onerous licenses for providers and facilities that perform abortions. HB 786 adds more burdens on abortion medication providers. The goal of this legislation is not to protect people with uteruses or keep us safer. (Despite the gibberish Lola likes to spout.) The real goal is to dissuade patients and medical providers from providing necessary healthcare. Wow Lola, why do you hate people with uteruses so much?
Lola Sheldon-Galloways’s bitterly ironic campaign bench ads from 2022
More Stupidity on Healthcare
Senator Daniel Emrich, R-Great Falls continues to fight established medical knowledge and try to stop immunization requirements with his SB 450. SB 450 has now passed from the Montana Senate to the Montana House. Before widespread vaccination, measles caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths each year. But who cares if your child catches a preventable and potentially fatal disease? Isn’t it better to be them to be immunization-free and dead?
LGBTQ+ Bigotry
Even though our Great Falls delegation aren’t the primary sponsors on several hateful anti-LGBTQ+ bills, they sure are fine voting for them.
But why listen to an expert when you can listen to your bigoted impulses, right Montana Republicans? It has passed though the legislature and these Great Falls legislators voted for it:
Fred Anderson
Ed Buttrey
Steve Galloway
Steve Gist
Scot Kerns
George Nikolakakos
Lola Sheldon-Galloway
Daniel Emrich
Steve Fitzpatrick
Jeremy Trebas
Thank you to Senator Wendy McKamey for voting no on SB 99. Senator McKamey was the ONLY Great Falls legislator that didn’t vote to pass this hate.
Knowing the homophobia of our governor, SB 99 will be signed into law and then the taxpayers get to pay for the lawsuits. Meanwhile trans youth are treated as punching bags.
Where does that leave us?
I wish I could end on a lighter note, but our Great Falls delegation and other Montana Republicans continues to let down Montana’s citizens. Keep speaking up and let them know we are watching and disagree with their hateful attacks on our rights. You can send a message to a legislator using this form: https://leg.mt.gov/web-messaging/ or give them a call, they love it. The general switchboard is (406) 444-4800 and your message will be delivered to a legislator
I’ve never done drag—unless you count the floor-length robe and colorful stole I wear every Sunday when I preach. Sometimes I think it could be fun (I’ve even got my drag name picked out: “Pauline Epistle”), but I know it is far more work than I am prepared to commit to. It’s also, apparently, extremely dangerous.
In Montana, as in over a dozen states, legislation is moving forward to ban or severely restrict drag performances. These bills mischaracterize drag as inherently sexual in nature, “appealing to prurient interest.” That’s the language of Representative Mitchell’s HB359, which passed its second reading in the Montana House this week.
I recently got a chance to chat with my senator, who is one of the bill’s co-sponsors, about why he chose to attach his name to it. He gave the usual talking points, saying that the intention was to protect children from “sexualization.” It’s the same impulse that’s behind the recent surge book-banning and educator-muzzling rhetoric and policy. Save the children; protect their innocence from the perversions of our culture.
When I asked my senator if he had ever attended a drag show, he told me that he had not, which I imagine is true of most of the people backing the bill. (Although it’s always possible one of them might have had a past life as a drag performer in South America, I suppose.)
If they had, they might realize that nine times out of ten, particularly in the case of all-ages shows, drag performers have more in common with clowns and ballerinas than with actual adult entertainment performers, which HB359 tries to paint them as.
But, of course, this has never been about protecting children’s innocence. The same people concerned about the psychological damage a child might experience witnessing a man in a colorful dress read a storybook about being kind to people have no problem telling the same child that unless they pledge their eternal servitude to an invisible being who watches their every moment and knows their every thought, they will be tortured for all eternity—out of love.
The real reason they want to ban drag performances from the public sphere is because drag, emblematic of queerness itself, is a threat to entrenched systems of power.
In a recent legislative committee for Montana SB234, discussion about how we define obscenity led to the point being made that the Bible itself could easily fit the category of obscene literature.
Ezekiel contains language more explicit than even the bawdiest drag show I’ve ever seen, and it does so for the purpose of prophetic critique. The prophet uses a graphic analogy of adultery to denounce Israel and Judah for their dalliance with Assyrian and Babylonian empires, respectively. (In a similar manner, today’s prophets have rightly pointed out that much of the American church is ‘in bed’ with White Nationalism).
Likewise Isaiah walked around naked for three years, and Jeremiah paraded around with a pair of dirty underwear, disrupting norms and provoking shock and disgust.
The Hebrew prophets were the original performance artists.
The intersection of artistic expression and social critique terrifies those with vested interests in maintaining authoritarian control. As Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann says in The Prophetic Imagination: “every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”
Drag is dangerous for that very reason. It points out the farce of rigid black-and-white—or rather, pink-and-blue—thinking and imagines a rainbow of possibility for God’s beloveds. We really are all born naked, and the rest—as Mama Ru says—is drag.
We are not so far off from the 1960s, when trans people and drag artists could be arrested just for existing in public, experiencing grotesque violence at the hands of the state. The violence is still happening, emboldened by the increase in hateful legislation and political rhetoric.
It was drag queens and trans people leading the charge in those days, sparking a revolution that would transform the country and make it safe for people like me to be fully myself. Now it is up to the rest of us to stand with them, speak out against the fear and hate, and celebrate the joy and the beauty that queer people bring to our world.
I have little reason to believe those trying to legislate queer and trans people out of existence will have a change of heart and relent from their “slate of hate.” But that just means my calling to speak out on behalf of the marginalized, to imagine a world where everyone has what they need, is as clear as it has ever been.
And if I need a refresher course in the prophetic vocation, I’ll find a big, scary Drag Queen and let her spill the tea.
Rev. Stephen Underwood is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), serving a congregation in Great Falls, MT. The above opinions are exclusively his own.
Image retrieved from Glacier Queer Alliance. Follow their work here: https://www.facebook.com/GlacierQueerAlliance
Some days it feels like we’re running a satire site here. I sit down to re-cap the Worst of the Worst and don’t know if I should start with the craziest (Lola Sheldon Galloway) or the stupidest (Daniel Emrich). So instead I’ll start with the most self-serving.
MOST SELF-SERVING
Lola and Steven Galloway are millionaire landlords, and they’re shaping new laws to make themselves even richer. This week, Steven introduced legislation (HB 439) that would make it easier for landlords to evict tenants, and invade their privacy. Read about Steven’s obliquely self-serving bill here: https://wtf406.com/2023/01/galloway-attacks-renters-rights/
Now Steven’s receiving help from his friend to further diminish renter’s rights. Senator Steve Fitzpatrick introduced SB 105, a bill that would “prohibit rent control on private properties.” That means landlords like the Galloways can charge insanely high rental prices. Without rent control Montana’s housing crisis will worsen. Folks will either become unhoused, or they’ll be forced to move out of state. We’re already seeing a huge increase of families living in RVs on the side of the road in Bozeman. Bills like these will worsen the housing crisis. Fitzpatrick’s bill benefits the wealthy (ie all the elected Reps in Great Falls) at the expense of the rest of us.
MOST HEARTLESS
Most Heartless is actually a tie this week.
The “Pro-Life” Party was hard at work killing kids again. Steve Gist, Scott Kerns, Steven Galloway, and Lola Galloway all voted against funding for youth suicide prevention. Montana continually leads the nation in suicides. Youth are particularly at risk, and other bills being heard will likely increase the number of suicide attempts by kids in our state. Denying funding for suicide prevention efforts while simultaneously passing bills that will increase youth suidice? That’s some villain shit right there. Read about why SB99 is going to kill kids here: https://wtf406.com/2023/01/sb-99-likely-to-increase-youth-suicide/
Senator Daniel Emrich managed to be disgusting on another end of the spectrum. Montana is a Right to Die state, meaning Montana’s can choose to die with dignity assisted by compassionate medical care. Emrich just can’t pass up an opportunity to impose his will on our private medical decisions. The GOP is trying to take away our right to die and criminalize doctors who provide this care. Despite his embarrassing lack of scientific understanding (more to come on this) Emrich decided he knows better than the Montana Hospital Association, doctors, patients, and their families. Emrich’s unkind and uninformed comments are featured in this article: https://dailymontanan.com/2023/02/01/bill-would-outlaw-physician-assisted-death-reversing-montanas-current-practice/?fbclid=IwAR3n5NCzUtcONW2Rv_HvqxSmS0POW-CoKWHY8XaDwKlzMA46gs2-3lQRe44
MOST UNEDUCATED
Which brings us to why Senator Emrich should probably sit down when anything even science-adjacent is discussed. Emrich is trying to ban the teaching of “scientific theory.” No, seriously. The theory of gravity must have hit this breadstick in the head because he clearly lacks even a third-grade level of scientific understanding. Read this somehow-not-a-joke bill here: https://leg.mt.gov/bills/2023/billpdf/LC2215.pdf
MOST ORWELLIAN
Lola Galloway is all over the list this week! Galloway has introduced a bill that would require ALL cell phones in Montana be installed with an ”obscenity” filter. Notably, she provides no definition for “obscenity.” Make no mistake, this is a government surveillance bill. Lola employs a familiar GOP tactic here and is trying to disguise her censorship attempts as an effort to protect children. Her bill asserts that the filter is necessary so kids can’t access obscene materials. Protecting kids from the dark corners of the internet would indeed be a worthy cause- but installing surveillance software on every phone in the state is an insane way to go about it. Further, it’s the responsibility of PARENTS to monitor their child’s internet usage. It sure as hell shouldn’t come in the form of an opt-out piece of government surveillance on every cell phone in the state. Much like the other bullshit “obscenity” legislation we’ve seen this session, the real goal is BIG GOVERNMENT eyes on us and attempts to limit access to material far-right nationalist Christians don’t like. That’s going to be anything LGBTQ+ and anything non-theistic. If Lola actually gave a fuck about kids, she probably would have voted for the suicide-prevention funding mentioned above. Read the bill here: https://legiscan.com/MT/text/HB349/id/2668315
GET INVOLVED
The GOP is taking huge steps to invade our private lives, take away our homes, and make themselves rich all at once. Great Falls, this is getting embarrassing. If you disagree with the dystopian future our Great Falls Reps are trying to write into law, then tell them! Find session information, look up bills, and contact your representatives here: https://leg.mt.gov/session/
