When New York magazine published an investigative report that found Republican Representative Nancy Mace had engaged in abusive, alcoholic, and inappropriate behavior with her staff, it came as no surprise to me. She had gone down a very familiar path with a completely foreseeable ending familiar to most transgender observers who have followed the arc of numerous transphobes over the years. It also wasn’t surprising that New York magazine made no mention of her obsession with transgender people as a sign of her downward spiral.

The pattern goes like this: Someone famous who thinks they’re untouchable says a bunch of nasty, aggressively anti-transgender things. Back in the early-to-mid 2010s it might get you fired, but since then it has been normalized to the point where there are zero consequences, and even quite a few benefits. Riley Gaines, a swimmer famous for inveighing against trans athletes, is making almost half a million dollars per year off of tying for fifth place, and Dave Chappelle was handsomely rewarded by Netflix and Saudi Arabia after his transphobic stand-up routine.

Most of the public shrugs off these episodes and moves on: The Overton window on transgender people has shifted to the point where people openly discuss whether they should have their guns taken away, be forcibly institutionalized, or eradicated from public life. But later, people who decided to angrily obsess over transgender people inevitably find new targets. They either say horribly racist things, fall apart mentally, expose themselves as a nasty piece of work in other ways, or some combination of all three.

When Mace did a sudden........

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