During her time in the South Carolina state legislature, Mace successfully campaigned to add rape and incest exceptions to the state’s 2019 six-week abortion ban; ahead of the vote on the bill, she spoke publicly for the first time about being raped by a classmate when she was sixteen. It was the aftermath of that teen-age sexual assault that caused her to pursue a degree from the Citadel. Succeeding in that maximally masculine institution became, she told the Charleston Post and Courier in 2019, “something she had to prove to herself she could do.” “It’s something you can’t believe happened, and you ask yourself, ‘How did I let this happen to me?’ It’s very difficult to overcome,” she said.
But Mace’s feminism has always been selective. She is an opponent of most abortion rights and has endorsed the doctrine of fetal personhood. And she has been tactically evasive when pressed about the many, many allegations of sexual abuse committed by the President, including those of E. Jean Carroll, which were affirmed by a jury. “Quite frankly, E. Jean Carroll’s comments when she did get the judgment, joking about what she was going to buy, it doesn’t—it makes it harder for women to come forward when they make a mockery out of rape, when they joke about it. It’s not O.K.,” Mace said in a contentious interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, in March, 2024.
Her stance on gay and trans rights has evolved in especially unsettling ways. When Mace arrived in Washington, she distinguished herself with her backing of gay and trans rights, which were quickly becoming a culture-war flash point. “I strongly support LGBTQ rights and equality,” she told the Washington Examiner in 2021. “No one should be discriminated against.” In 2022, after voting for a bill to insure permanent federal recognition for same-sex marriages, Mace, who was divorced twice before she met Bryant, tweeted, “If gay couples want to be as happily or miserably married as straight couples, more power to them. Trust me, I’ve tried it more than once.”
But this position was short-lived. After McBride’s election, Mace introduced a resolution that would have banned transgender women from using restrooms in the Capitol; when a foster youth activist named James McIntyre shook her hand and spoke on behalf of the rights of trans minors at a photo op a few weeks later, she accused him of “physically accosting” her, and he spent the night in jail. (Charges against McIntyre were quickly dropped.) Amid the firestorm, Mace embarked on a media tour to publicize her opposition to trans rights, and took the opportunity to make frequent use of the word “tranny,” a move that seemed calculated to shock. “Tranny. Yeah, tranny, tranny, tranny,” Mace said to a twenty-year-old trans University of South Carolina student who asked her to stop using the slur in April, 2025.
Many Republicans have adopted transphobia as a culture-war issue. Mace is unusual in that her insistence that she does so for the sake of women’s rights seems more plausibly sincere. “I, as a woman, am standing up to protect other women from men being in our private spaces,” she said on Fox News of the bathroom-ban resolution. Now gay people, too, whose rights she once voted to protect, have become targets of her hate. “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” she wrote on X, last October. After Trump endorsed Evette in the South Carolina gubernatorial campaign on May 29th, Mace posted a photograph of her opponent superimposed over pride flags.
