Zooey Zephyr will not allow herself to be marginalized, no matter how hard some people try to make that happen.
She won election to the Montana House of Representatives in 2022, becoming the first openly transgender person to serve in that legislative body. But after Zephyr passionately spoke against anti-LGBTQ bills under consideration and criticized supporters of that legislation, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives moved to silence her.
Zephyr’s journey from duly elected lawmaker representing Missoula to pariah banned from the House floor, gallery and antechamber is told in the Oscar-shortlisted documentary Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr, streaming on The New Yorker website and on The New Yorker’s YouTube page. It’s directed by Kimberly Reed, a Montana native and openly trans filmmaker whose credits include Prodigal Sons and Dark Money.
“I’d watched as things heated up with Zooey, some of her early remarks [on the House floor], which led to her not being recognized to speak, which led to protests, which led to censure,” Reed tells Deadline. “So when all of that happens, there wasn’t frankly any way I could not make that film, is sort of how it felt.”
The “Seat 31” of the title refers to Zephyr’s desk within the House chamber. When the Republican supermajority voted to oust her, she simply moved her desk, in a manner of speaking. Zephyr posted a sticky note labeled “Seat 31” above a bench in a hallway outside the chamber, a location not technically covered by the ban. That bench, next to a snack bar, became her workspace.
Referring to the very public location of her “desk,” Zephyr tells someone in the film, “Did you hear my favorite joke I’ve been making, which is like, ‘Finally, transparency in government.’ Open doors.”
Reed likens what happened to Zephyr to a trio of Democratic state legislators about 1,500 miles away who became known as “the Tennessee Three.” In 2023, Republican members of the Tennessee House of Representatives voted on resolutions to expel the three after they led protests on the House floor in favor of gun reform. Two Black Democratic lawmakers were kicked out; a white Democrat narrowly avoided expulsion.
“All of this stuff with Zooey heated up about a month or six weeks after that. So, that was sort of the context that I was viewing everything in,” Reed explains. “The reason that Zooey was expelled from the Montana House of Representatives was rather similar to the reason that the Tennessee Three were expelled, and it just has a lot to do with, I think, bigotry and really patronizing attitude from the dominant culture that’s in these legislatures.”
Seat 31 begins with the comments Zephyr made on the House floor that angered members of the Republican caucus. Speaking against proposed legislation to ban gender-affirming medical and surgical care for minors, Zephyr declared, “The only thing I will say is if you vote ‘yes’ on this bill and ‘yes’ on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.”
Reed characterizes the Republican response as thin-skinned.
“Comments like that are made all the time, but apparently the Republicans in the House of Representatives in 2023 did not want to be shamed by somebody who was trans,” she observes. “That reaction seemed to be right in line with the elected officials in Tennessee in the same [legislative] session, who didn’t want to be shamed by Black people.”
Reed’s film makes its bid for an Oscar nomination just days after Sarah McBride, a Democrat from Delaware, became the first openly trans person to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Firebrand MAGA congresswoman Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, has been pushing a bill that would force any trans member of Congress to use bathrooms that correspond to the gender they were assigned at birth.
“It has been very interesting to see the attacks on Rep. Sarah McBride,” Reed notes. “At a federal level, what we’re seeing is the same kind of continuation of the attacks that we saw in the 2024 election cycle. Seemed like the closing argument [from Republicans] really centered around two things: immigration and marginalizing and attacking trans folks.”
Reed continues, “One of the committees [in the Montana House] tried to move forward a bill that would do the same thing to Zooey that Nancy Macy’s bill was doing to Sarah McBride at the federal level. That bill did not make it out of committee. The reason that bill to tell her where she can go to the restroom did not pass out of committee was just because of the personal relationship that Zooey has with other members of the Republican caucus, that it’s that personal one-to-one relationship that she has that basically made it a lot harder for her colleagues to dehumanize her in a way that these bills are designed to do.”
Reed draws a parallel between that bill failing in committee and the purpose of the documentary.
“We kind of focus on the story of a trans person, try to pull people into that world so that viewers feel like they actually get to see the world from Zooey’s point of view and not the other way around,” the director says. “They actually experience what film is so good at, which is just its ability to humanize the people that you’re walking through this world with.”
In 2024, Zephyr overwhelming won reelection, earning more than 80 percent of the vote. She began the new legislative term a few days ago, restored to her place within the House chamber (the earlier ban expired with the end of the previous legislative session). Democrats gained some ground in the House in the 2024 election, enough to put Zephyr in a stronger position to serve without fear of having to move her “seat” to the corridor outside the chamber.
“The Republican super majority that was necessary to expel her last session is no longer intact,” Reed says. “They no longer have two thirds of the votes in order to expel her. It’s very unlikely that she’ll be expelled again. So yes, she is back and representing the folks in Missoula.”