Senate Bill 8 was passed by the state Senate on Aug. 19 and by the state House on Aug. 28. It now heads to Gov. Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign it into law. The bill mandates that all public institutions, including but not limited to universities, courts, state rest stops, and family violence shelters, establish a policy to ensure that bathrooms and similar private spaces are designated according to biological sex as defined by the state.
The legislation empowers private individuals to enforce the rule by filing formal written complaints. Institutions found in violation could face an initial fine of $25,000, followed by staggering fines of $125,000. Each day an institution is considered to be in violation of the law counts as its own separate offense.
The bill’s language creates immediate legal and semantic confusion. In 2025, the Legislature passed House Bill 229, which established a “specific, clear definition” for references to “man” and “woman” in state law. But this year’s SB 8 bypasses that definition in favor of a new one, which its House sponsor, Representative Angelia Orr, said was modeled on similar legislation, HB 121, in Montana. HB 121 faced immediate legal challenges from the Montana branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, with a court injunction going into effect against the law earlier this year. Orr said that SB 8 does not account for intersex people, who can instead be accommodated by single-occupant restrooms as needed.
During an Aug. 22 meeting of the House Committee on State Affairs, Representative Rafael Anchía highlighted his core criticism of the bill: the absence of evidence for the problem it claims to solve.
“When the bathroom bills were first introduced to the Legislature, we had the police chiefs of Dallas, San Antonio and Houston testify against the bathroom bills,” Anchía said. “They told us exactly this: they have found no known incidents of bathroom assaults performed by men posing as transgender women. Zero. Guess what, it is now nearly a decade later and we still have no examples of this as a problem in our state. When a legislator proposes a bill to address a criminal justice concern, isn’t it important that they determine if there is an actual problem? Zero cases in the past decade.”
The Bill’s Supporters
Proponents of the bill argue it is a necessary measure to protect privacy and safety in intimate spaces, grounding their argument in traditional values and a biological view of sex.“SB 8 is common sense,” Orr said. “It establishes clear boundaries, protects vulnerable women and children, and ensures Texas law respects privacy and safety in sex specific spaces.”
Megan Bitten, who works with Texas Values Action, one of the largest Christian policy groups in Texas, said that she had seen trans people use the bathrooms in the state capital when she visited and that such behavior caused her discomfort. Bitten said she left the capital bathroom after seeing a trans woman and waited until another cisgender woman arrived so they could go in together. “
“This legislation is critical for preserving women’s dignity in Texas,” Bitten said. “By ensuring places are sex separated, we will be ensuring women are secure from harm.”
The Bill’s Detractors
Gordy Carmona, a local North Texas organizer with Equality Texas, said that since the first anti-trans bathroom bill was introduced in Texas eight years ago, the queer and trans community in the state had been fighting to preserve what few rights they had while other consider fleeing to more welcoming states and countries.“SB 8 is going to create an immense amount of fear in people who simply want to use the bathroom in peace,” Carmona said. “We have seen people bear their whole heart and tears before the legislature and yet here we are with an ever-increasing list of anti-trans bills that don’t just harm the queer community but harm everyone in society when people are forced out of the state and those who fail to conform to typical cis standards get entangled with the newfound bathroom vigilantes the state has effectively authorized.”
Mickey Dolphin moved to Texas five years ago to attend the University of Texas at Dallas. Dolphin said that they had made some of their best connections here and bonded with incredibly accepting people, yet they were surprised by the hostility with which the state dismantled campus offices meant to uplift diversity, equity and inclusion when Texas was such a diverse state.
“Being in Texas is just weird,” Dolphin said. “Since coming here, I have met the friendliest and most accepting people. I have found an incredibly vibrant and diverse queer scene in Dallas and the other major cities in the state, yet the state legislature just seems so hyper-focused on destroying what remains of that friendly charm.”
Dolphin said it felt like the people pushing for this kind of legislation just didn’t grasp that trans and gender non-conforming people were also just regular people who “sometimes just need to use the bathroom.” Sasha Wuu, another trans UT Dallas senior, said that she couldn’t understand how the proponents of the bill had come to the conclusion that trans people were threats when they used public bathrooms.
“I honestly get scared every time I use the bathroom,” Wuu said. “Meeting my basic biological functions while in public means I could run into someone who doesn’t even see me as human. It only takes one person to ruin your day because they chose to focus on you in the bathroom. When I go to the bathroom, I am completely focused on getting my needs met, cleaning up and leaving as quickly as humanly possible. It might just be me, but public bathrooms aren’t appealing to be in for long.”
Emma Jansen has been in Texas her whole life. For her, realizing she was trans in Texas was a major challenge because if her parents weren’t absolutely supportive, she says she ran the risk of being sent to an anti-trans conversion camp. A 2023 report from the Trevor Project found that Texas was among the top five states with the most conversion therapy practitioners.
“I was around 16 when I realized I was trans,” Jansen said. “It felt great to get to know and explore this part of myself, but I also felt a new weight. The weight of fear as if this was some horrible secret I had to hide. The culture Texas has fostered in the past decade around trans people has had a huge toll on my mental health.”
Enforcement Issues
Stacy Suits has served as the Travis County constable of Precinct 3 for nine years. Suits told the Legislature during the Aug. 22 hearing that his office was placed directly across from a public courthouse’s bathroom. In all his years as constable, they had never received a complaint that a man had entered the women’s bathroom.“We have not had incidents of the issue this bill targets, and we aren’t interested in suddenly becoming the body police,” Suits said. “We have enough on our plate deciding what is hemp and what is marijuana; we just don’t have the capacity to also determine the gender of each person that uses our public bathrooms.”
Suits emphasizing that some Texas laws just aren’t enforceable as written aren’t unique to trans people using the bathroom. Wesley Phelps, a historian of the 20th-century U.S. South and LGBTQ history, said that for decades now, queer activities had been fighting Texas penal code, which criminalized “deviate” sexual intercourse with someone of the same sex. Phelps said that even before 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas made such a code legally unenforceable, the law in Texas was often ignored by local police because it required such a level of insight into intimate private behaviors that law enforcement officers couldn’t really enforce the law.
“The law doesn’t target specific individuals, which means it is harder for affected individuals to prove their standing before a court,” Phelps said. “This system of abstraction between the state and the actual punishments provides a level of shielding for these laws that helps protect them against challenges that question their constitutionality.”
ACLU of Texas Government Relations Coordinator Andrew Hendrickson said that because this law was open-ended, threatening extreme attorney fees even in frivolous lawsuits and allowing for repeated $125,000 fines, government institutions would be practically pressured to overcomply to avoid complaints or fines from the state.
“The really scary thing about this bill is the threat of overenforcement,” Hendrickson said. “You will see a lot of discrimination towards trans people as institutions make the choice to cut their support for this marginalized community if it means fewer fines. All of this as a result of a bill where it isn’t even clear who is supposed to verify gender or how that process would even work. So many of the proponents of this bill claim to know that men are in the women’s restroom, but I don’t know how they could possibly find this out unless these knowers have committed a serious crime by peeking over the stall door.”
