In the college town of Missoula, pride flags are as common as the peaks of Montana’s Rattlesnake Mountains. Even a pedestrian crossing in the city center is iridescent.

Often described as a blue island in a sprawling red state, Missoula sent the first openly transgender legislator in Montana history to the U.S. Capitol. The city’s voters, fully aware that there were far more conservatives statewide, were still shocked by what happened next.

Their new representative, Zooey Zephyr, was barred from speaking on the floor of the legislature by the Republican majority, who accused her of violating decency by saying she had blood on her. [their] hands by passing a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors.

On Wednesday, Republicans voted to bar Zephyr from the House of Representatives for the remainder of the legislature, which ends next month.

Zephyr was elected in November with 80% of the vote in her very liberal district, which runs through the oddly-aligned section of downtown Missoula known as Slant Streets and stretches to the doorstep of the University of Montana, the

7,000 students

school of about 10,000 students that has long fueled the city’s liberal sensibility.

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Nestled in a narrow valley on the northwestern edge of the state, Missoula prides itself on its funky, countercultural style. This week’s hot ticket was the International Wildlife Film Festival, with a parade in which people dressed in animal costumes marched through the downtown area.

Zephyr’s silence has both shocked and reminded her constituents of the growing distance between them and the rest of their state.

When she first ran, I thought, “They’re going to do something to limit her power,” said Erin Flint, 28, a Missoula resident who plans to enroll in college for a graduate degree in arts education. But she didn’t expect such a dramatic move as silencing the new legislature or banning her from the floor.

Montana has long leaned to the right, but with more of a libertarian streak than an enthusiasm for culture wars. This allowed the Democrats to regularly win the governorship over the decades and occasionally control of one or both houses of the legislature.

Growing up in a town of 750 in eastern Montana, Andy Nelson didn’t feel comfortable being gay until as a senior at the University of Montana when he volunteered at the Center, a Missoula LGBTQ+ community group of which he is now an executive director. is .

He recalls long discussions about whether such a group was still necessary after same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide in 2015. But that all changed in 2016 with Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy.

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Trump handily won the state that year and in 2020. Republicans now occupy both Montana’s congressional seats and all state offices, though one of the state’s two U.S. senate seats is held by Democrat Jon Tester, a top target of the GOP in 2024. Last year, when Zephyr was elected in her Missoula district of population of about 11,000, Republicans garnered a wave of popular support to win a supermajority in both chambers of the legislature.

Zeke Cork, 62, one of the Centers board members, remembered the 1970s as a great time to come out in Missoula, though he acknowledged that he still had to follow certain rules to be safe as a transgender person. Cork, a dispatcher, has lived all over the United States, but came back to Montana in 2015. He felt safe enough to switch completely two years ago.

But today, Cork said, the state’s live-and-let-live sensibility seems to be ebbing away. Conservative protesters, often armed, disrupt pride events.

Now you don’t know who will be the one to take out on you and your community, he said.

Cork has traveled east to the Capitol in Helena to speak out against legislation affecting transgender people since it was first introduced. After Zephyr was silenced, he joined dozens of others from Missoula at the Capitol this week, where they began to cry: Let her speak! after being gagged again. Seven protesters were arrested.

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We’d much rather live quiet lives, out of the spotlight, living under the radar, living our best lives, Cork said. I don’t want to have this fight.

But she speaks for me, and I sent her to that house, said Cork, who lives in Zephyrs County. We are now fighting for democracy.

Legislative Republicans claim they are the ones preserving democracy by following their chamber’s rules and gagging Zephyr for slandering her colleagues.

We will uphold the will of the people that sent 68 Republicans to Helena, several said in a statement Monday night, after activists, including dozens from Missoula, jeered them from the House Gallery.

In the minds of many other Montanans, it is Missoula that has changed, not her.

Missoula used to be a great place, says Ken Sayler, 64, who grew up in the city when sawmills were the main industry. Then the factories closed and the city became much more like the university, which drove him with disgust to a remote house in the mountains, where he made parts for boats.

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If you’re transgender, I don’t care, Sayler said, adding that he had little sympathy for Zephyr. She stepped out of bounds.

Sayler was having a beer at a bar about 20 miles south of Missoula where many patrons mocked the idea of ​​a transgender legislator. The bar is located in a small town in the precinct of Senator Theresa Manzella, who chairs a group of conservative state legislators called the Montana Freedom Caucus, who pushed for the measure to silence Zephyr with a statement that deliberately misrepresents her. interpreted.

Jim McConnell, a 69-year-old machinist, questioned the idea of ​​someone like Zephyr serving in the state House. But he didn’t like the idea of ​​muzzling her.

They have a right to speak, McConnell said. But in Montana they’re barking up the wrong tree.

Experts say intense cultural battles don’t suit Montana politics.

“This is a conservative, libertarian state, as opposed to a conservative, authoritarian state,” said Paul Pope, a political scientist at Montana State University in Billings, noting that the zoo in a much less liberal Montana town recently saw an influx of of support after conservative activists attacked the story hour.

Even if they succeed here in the short term, he said of Republicans, it will hurt them in the long run.

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But for now, many in Missoula are simply stunned.

“They’ve robbed 11,000 Montanans of their voices,” said Ignatius Fitzgerald, a University of Montana freshman who grew up in the district. Republicans have left us without a voice and without a recourse.

Even some whose politics don’t match Zephyr’s said they didn’t think the legislature should silence her.

Even if I disagree with her policies, I think she has a right to speak up, said Addie Glidewell, a 19-year-old journalism student who advocates banning gender-affirming care for minors. I don’t think it should be closed.

Danny Wainwright, a 56-year-old high school teacher in Zephyr County, said he doesn’t always support aggressive protests or bombastic political rhetoric. But he felt Zephyr’s actions were appropriate.

When you’re in the minority and the Republicans have a supermajority, you have to be heard somehow,” he said. ‘That’s your job.