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, Republican-controlled 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 the publication anointed as people who could change the world?
Her rise to international fame began in 2022, when she became the first openly transgender woman elected to the Montana legislature, after a grassroots campaign prompted by the Republican majority’s mounting attack on trans rights and the independent judiciary system.
The 2023 legislature, which convened in January, included a spate of legislation that undercut medical care and other essential rights for trans people. To be clear, these were not issues rising from a groundswell of popular support. Montana has only recently flipped to being deep red politically, and the most talked-about topic across the state these days is the unaffordability of housing.
Making life difficult for trans people is not something most voters were demanding. But Republicans insisted that trans rights were a threat and pursued legislation, ignoring hours of testimony against the bills.
The severity of the attack on trans rights in Montana was new; far-right conservatives targeting the marginalized as a tactic is not. Ken Toole, who was director of the Montana Human Rights Network through battles over gay rights and marriage equality in the 1990s and 2000s, recalls a similar landscape. “The conservative movement in the state used these kinds of issues to characterize the political debate [then and now],” he said. “Essentially, it’s scapegoating.”
This spring, during a debate over a bill to limit gender-affirming care for youth, Zephyr spoke passionately against the legislation: “I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,” she told the house.
It was then that the Republican leadership decided her words went too far.
Leadership demanded she apologize; she refused. Multiple studies have shown that trans youth have higher suicide rates, she argued, and this kind of legislation would have a detrimental impact on kids.
In retaliation, the legislative leadership, run largely by one family, cut her microphone for three days, a move unprecedented in a citizen legislature with a long history of spicy rhetoric and fiery debates.
On the third day of her silencing, a group of protesters filled the house gallery, a collection of seats above the grand chamber, to challenge what was happening. They chanted “Let her speak” as Zephyr held up her microphone and put a hand over her heart.
Police in riot gear swept the protesters from the capitol and, in another historic move, the Republican leadership closed off public access to the gallery for the remainder of the legislative session. Republicans later voted to banish Zephyr from the house chambers, leaving her to set up a makeshift office on a bench outside the door of the body where she had been elected to serve. The next day, several women related to Republican legislators showed up and took over her bench, seemingly hoping to drive her out of sight.
It was this anti-democratic wave against Zephyr and her own calm, deliberate opposition to fading away quietly that shot her into media stratosphere. The story spread fast and far in a country watching democratic norms fall away in Republican-controlled states.
She appeared on ABC’s The View, was featured across national and international media, and was invited to national events. For months, her message seemed to be everywhere. Montana Republicans, in trying to silence one opposing voice, had accidentally turned her into a national star. For Zephyr, though, the moment was about much more than fleeting celebrity. She’s planning to build a lasting movement out of it.
In each conversation I’ve had with Zephyr, her fiancee figures prominently. She proposed to Erin Reed, the trans journalist and activist, shortly after the legislative session ended this spring; they traveled to France to celebrate. Reed lives on the east coast, and for now Zephyr is committed to her work in Montana, making this state a more inclusive and safe place for families like her own.
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Zephyr was born in 1988 in Billings, Montana, still the state’s largest city. It’s long been the heart of conservative Montana politics, a place where ranchers and Chamber of Commerce types ran the show. Her own family was conservative and religious.
She describes her childhood there as fairly unremarkable, like that of any other Montana kid. In 2000, her father’s work prompted the family to move to Seattle. There, Zephyr found her passion in sports, winning five state wrestling titles and finishing high school with an offer of a wrestling scholarship. She opted to stay closer to family and go to the University of Washington instead, but it’s clear that competitive sports shaped her. She still recites by memory the words of a banner that hung over the practice room: “Every day I leave this room a better wrestler and a better person than when I entered,” she says, adding how the coach made them slap the sign as they left the room.
It’s become a personal motto.
After graduation, Zephyr was called back to Montana. This time, as an adult, she went to Missoula to study creative writing at the University of Montana. She found a job at the university and worked part-time teaching the Lindy Hop at a local dance studio. In 2018, she reached the point in her life when it was time to come out to her community and transition. Her family’s response caused her to cut ties, but as she tells the story, Missoula, one of Montana’s more progressive cities, surrounded her with love and warmth.
It was then that she chose her name: Zooey Simone Zephyr. Zooey, meaning life, Simone, a tribute to her paternal grandmother, and Zephyr, “a gentle breeze blowing from the west”.
“I thought, ‘I want to be that, a gentle breeze,’” she says.
Her community rallied around her. Her boss immediately had the restroom signs changed to remove gender markers, getting ahead of any questions. Her dance students didn’t bat an eye when she told them her name and identity as a woman. And her friends gathered at a brewery to celebrate the transition. The response from Missoula made her certain she was in the right place.
In the years since, she has at times debated leaving Montana as the attacks on trans people mounted. But now, she says, “I’m not going anywhere. This is my state. I was born here. You can’t kick me out.”
She toyed with the idea of running for a different office, but her heart is in organizing.
We talked at length about the changing face of Montana and what it means to have grown up here, particularly when it seems the politics have been hijacked by a national agenda that has very little to do with ordinary people’s lives. She felt no one in elected office was listening to her, and so once she decided to run, she was dead set on winning.
“I remember thinking to myself: if you really want to move the needle, you need representation,” she said.
In Missoula, representation is spreading. Gwen Nicholson, a young Indigenous transgender woman who was born and raised there, is running for city council on a progressive platform centered on affordable housing.
Nicholson worked in the capitol during the anti-trans onslaught this winter. She remembers thinking: “Why am I not welcome? Why does it feel like this place, which is my home and has been home to my family for generations, is trying to push me out?”
Nicholson said she had confessed to a friend: “‘All this shit makes me want to run,’ and they were like, ‘Run away, or run for office?’ There has to be some material way to fight back.”
This is the kind of movement Zephyr wants to see catch fire all across Montana. The state has been defined for generations by complex, sometimes surprising politics – but contemporary rhetoric has flattened its identity in recent years to that of just another deep red state. In traveling throughout her home state, she has found opinions that go far beyond the standard talking points that overwhelm political debate.
“Every conversation you have with someone, you go to a community where Democrats haven’t run a candidate in a long time, and you talk to folks there, and they want to fight back,” Zephyr says.
Zephyr will kick off a different kind of political effort in Montana beginning this fall. She’s creating a political action committee to raise money that will help her travel the state and recruit and train candidates for state office. In the last election, Democrats didn’t even appear on the ballot in one-third of legislative races, and the resulting landslide gave Republicans a supermajority and nearly unlimited power over Montanans’ lives. Dissenting voices were ignored and written off. Zephyr intends to build a movement that will empower progressives to run and win in places like Libby where Democrats haven’t won in years.
“We can make that difference on the ground, we can move the needle on the ground here in a way that the national Democratic party wouldn’t know how to do,” she says. “It starts from the bottom.”
People deserve to be heard, she says, and right now, elected officials in this state are only listening to a select few.
• In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
