Even though Texas has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy, a poverty rate higher than the national average, almost 2 million families at risk of hunger and a decreasing water supply paired with record-breaking heat waves, there are always more problems to confront. In Texas, lawmakers are making plenty of time during this Legislative session to tackle one of those other issues — sex.
The most recent sessions in Austin have featured bills that limit one's ability to get off, but that isn’t anything new for Texas, which has had homophobic sodomy laws on the books since it became the 28th state. Following a 2003 Supreme Court decision, the law isn't enforceable but has not been removed from the Texas Penal Code 22 years later. The same rule also theoretically bans oral sex. Prudes.
Here's a look at some of the anti-sex bills that have been filed so far.
An End To Discounted Masturbation
Hillary Hickland, a freshman representative from Central Texas filed a bill to keep convenience store coupons from being used to buy sex toys. House Bill 1549 would ban the sale of self-pleasure toys in stores that are not explicitly sex shops. Hickland drafted the bill intending to prevent children from being unnecessarily exposed to explicit materials.
“Children have the right to grow up free from premature exposure to explicit materials, and as lawmakers, it’s our responsibility to uphold that right,” Hickland wrote in an email to the Observer in 2024.
Stores like Walmart, Target and CVS have been selling relatively tame and discreetly packaged sex toys for years. They’re usually located somewhere near condoms and tampons, in the personal health aisle, if you’re looking to stock up in case HB 1549 passes, though it probably won’t. This bill, like many of the other sex-related bills, is a bit of a red herring that eats up valuable session minutes, according to Sen. Nathan Johnson.
“This is such a grotesque display of misplaced priorities that it is disheartening,” Johnson said to the Observer in December. “I hope we get over this stuff real fast because the voters, including Republican primary voters, Democratic primary voters, every voter, really need us to perform our job.”
Opt-in Sex-ed
Potentially the most consequential of the war on sex is the efforts to reshape sex education. Just two years ago, the state updated the health curriculum for the first time since the ‘90s, but notably left its long-standing “abstinence-only” foundation. The emphasis on waiting until marriage has been proven to be counterproductive, and only increases the amount of uninformed and unsafe sex that occurs among teenagers, according to a study from the Journal of Adolescent Health.
Texas was an opt-in state, meaning parents must provide written consent before their students can learn about the birds and bees in class. As an aside, when the Texas State School Board rewrote the health curriculum, they voted to leave out any material teaching “consent”. The policy requiring parents to opt-in expired in 2024, but a new bill, Senate Bill 371, would make opt-in sex-ed the norm in perpetuity.
Beyond that, a series of freshly filed bills could potentially hold educators culpable for the “sale, distribution, or display of harmful material to minors”, by removing legal protections for sex education teachers. The bills, don’t directly target sex education, but it’s obvious collateral damage.
“If a teacher isn’t sure if the materials they want to show would run afoul of the law, they may just outright avoid the material,” Miranda Estes a spokesperson for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States said to the Austin Chronicle. “Whether or not the bill becomes law, it is still deeply concerning.”
The Morning After
Perhaps not all hope is lost for sex in Texas. Rep. Donna Howard, a Democrat from Austin, has filed a bill, House Bill 653, that would prohibit government agencies from impeding the procurement of, or education related to, emergency contraception.The bill applies to Food and Drug Administration-approved agents that prevent the fertilization of an egg post-coitally with a large dose of hormones, also known as the morning-after pill or Plan B. It’s a rare avenue of access to reproductive care in Texas.
“To have such a strict abortion ban is detrimental to the overall health care for a lot of women,” Howard said to KENS 5. “We want to make sure that Texas women have what they need to get the health care they need so that not only they can be healthy, but their babies can be healthy, their families can be healthy.”
A bill to criminalize Plan B failed to pass in 2023. That bill was filed by former Rep. Bryan Slaton, who also attempted to make abortion a capital offense punishable by death in 2021. Slaton did not file any bills this session, as he was formally expelled from the House in a unanimous vote in 2023 after an investigation uncovered he had engaged in sexual conduct with a 19-year-old aide.
