Anti-transgender bills pushed by GOP state lawmakers

Over the past three years, Republican state lawmakers have put forward a barrage of bills to regulate the lives of transgender youths, restricting the sports teams they can play on, bathrooms they can use and medical care they can receive.

But even by those standards, the start of the 2023 legislative season stands out for the aggressiveness with which lawmakers are pushing into new territory.

The bills they have proposed — more than 150 in at least 25 states — include bans on transition care into young adulthood, restrictions on drag shows using definitions that could broadly encompass performances by transgender people, measures that would prevent teachers in many cases from using names or pronouns matching students' gender identities, and requirements that schools out transgender students to their parents.

The flood of legislation is part of a long-term campaign by national groups that see transgender rights as an issue on which they can harness voter anger — as with the campaigns against remote learning and critical race theory that reshaped many school boards and lifted Republicans in Virginia's elections in 2021 — though the midterm elections provided little evidence of it.

“This is a political winner,” said Terry Schilling, the president of the conservative American Principles Project, arguing that more voters would have been swayed had many Republicans not “shied away” from the subject.

The potential consequences for transgender people, for whom harassment and threats have become common and suicide rates are high, are profound. Many express a sense that the power of their government is being turned against them as they try to live their lives.

“We have shifted this conversation so incredibly far in the direction of restrictions on trans people's autonomy and rights in a way that was completely unfathomable to many of us even just three or four years ago,” said Chase Strangio, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Legislation in Oklahoma and South Carolina would make it a felony to provide hormonal or surgical transition treatment to transgender people younger than 26 — an uncharted incursion into adults' health care. Other bills in both states and in Kansas and Mississippi would ban such care up to age 21. And bills in more than a dozen states would ban it for minors, which Arkansas was the first to do in 2021, against the consensus of major medical organizations.

A bill in Mississippi — declaring that “separate is not inherently unequal,” an allusion to Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling in which the Supreme Court upheld segregation — would define sex as immutably set at birth, denying transgender identities under state law. A measure in West Virginia would define “any transvestite and/ or transgender exposure, performances or display” as obscene, potentially outlawing transgender people's presence around children.

Not all, or perhaps even most, of the measures will become law, and those that do may face legal challenges. But as of Tuesday, more than 10 bills had made it through committee.