Nancy Mace would like everyone to stop talking about Nancy Mace. The outgoing South Carolina congresswoman recently emerged from her unsuccessful run for governor with a new YouTube show, a dramatically different look and arms covered in tattoos. Social media noticed. Mace responded by posting a pouty photograph of herself prominently displaying the tattoos; what kids might call a “thirst trap.”
“Thoughts and prayers to all those affected by my sleeves,” she wrote. “Made the mistake of opening my social media this afternoon. Some of yall are OUT OF CONTROL. My biceps should NOT be a news story. We have more important things to worry about.”
Tattoo facts that those aren’t sleeves aside, she has a point. There are so many more important things to worry about. Mace’s biceps, for example, would rank considerably lower on my list than the years she spent obsessing over other people’s bodies. Mace became one of Congress’ loudest anti-trans voices after Democrat Sarah McBride of Delaware became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress in 2024. Before McBride had even been sworn in, Mace introduced a resolution intended to prevent her from using women’s restrooms at the Capitol. Asked whether the measure specifically targeted McBride, Mace said yes.
She repeatedly attacked transgender people publicly and using slurs, raising the question in LGBT communities of whether the lady doth “protest too much,” along the lines of studies that show homophobia is linked to closeted homosexuality: could her transphobia could be a form of internalized homophobia? Does she hate others because she hates a part of herself that she’s hidden for years like those tattoos?
I don’t care that Mace has tattoos. I love tattoos. I have tattoos. I don’t care how much skin she shows. Wear a thong bikini and bring a stripper pole to Congress if you write a law changing the dress code instead of wasting your time being a small-minded transphobe. I’m not interested in policing whether a 48-year-old woman is trying to look younger, hotter or different after losing an election. Women get enough appearance bullshit already. She’d be hot if she wasn’t a transphobic hatemonger who thinks it’s her job to police the bedrooms and bodily decisions of others, but that "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
What interests me is the freedom Mace automatically assumes belongs to her. Her body. Her identity. Her decision. Sound familiar? Mace explained she got nine tattoos during a difficult period involving personal and professional upheaval. She described tattooing as a way of reclaiming her body and processing emotional pain. People reported that Mace said she wanted to experience the physical “pain I need to feel.” I have no problem with that explanation.
There’s also something perfect about one of Mace’s tattoo choices. Running down her arm is the opening sentence of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
Queer publications immediately noticed the incongruity. GO Magazine asked the obvious question: “Do we think she knows?” Mrs. Dalloway is hardly obscure. Clarissa Dalloway recalls her youthful attraction to Sally Seton and describes kissing her as one of the most exquisite moments of her life. Woolf had relationships with women, most famously Vita Sackville-West.
There’s Nancy Mace, veteran culture warrior, walking around with queer literary history permanently inked into her skin. You can’t make this shit up.
Before-and-after pictures of Mace compare the polished congressional headshot with inked baddie; her Twitter profile pouts “GET MACED” at you in pink puffy glitter. One meme described her before-and-after photos as “real life vs. Tinder profile.” Her transformation has generated enough chatter that Mace complained her biceps shouldn’t be news while simultaneously providing everyone with a closer photograph of the biceps in question.
She wants us to look. She just wants to control what we’re allowed to say about what we see. That’s where this stops being about tattoos. For years, Mace has appointed herself an authority on how other people should present their bodies, describe themselves and move through public space. She decided Sarah McBride’s private trip to the bathroom was worthy of federal intervention. Now Mace is experiencing something queer and trans people know intimately: people staring at your body, discussing your appearance, questioning choices you made about it and deciding what those choices supposedly say about who you are.
Nancy Mace is the gatekeeping body-autonomy bigoted Karenosaurus NIMBY at the HOA meeting no sane human would attend for three hours.
And there’s another layer. Mace’s tattoos and new public persona appear to represent some kind of personal reinvention after political defeat. Maybe they do. People reinvent themselves all the time. They can look in the mirror and decide the person staring back no longer represents who they are and alter the outside until it feels more like the inside. Mace clearly understands this. But only when the body belongs to Nancy Mace.
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