With the 89th Legislative session looming, many Republican lawmakers are already mirroring past sessions, pre-filing 32 anti-trans bills for 2025.
If there's anything surprising about this number, it might be that it seems a tad small. Last year, House and Senate Republicans drafted 69 anti-trans bills and successfully passed six laws that restricted gender-affirming care, drag performances and transgender and intersex athletes. This year, many Texas reps, again, are focused on the same issues while keeping hot-button topics like public school restrooms at the top of the docket.
The bills in question have attracted criticism from the LGBTQIA+ community for their sweeping reach. Some of the proposed limitations would outlaw drag performances in front of children, although the included definition of drag is vague. Other bills suggest invasive chromosomal tests as a determining factor for which team scholastic athletes are eligible.
“The cruelty, as always, is the point,” wrote Progress Texas on X in response to the bills.
Public Restrooms
Public school restrooms remain front of mind for Republican lawmakers. Particularly concerned with the bathroom behaviors of children is Rep. Steve Toth, a Republican from The Woodlands, who sponsored three bills that would ensure public school restrooms and locker rooms are accessible to users based only on their biological sex.One of the bills proposes a $100,000 fine for school districts that fail to adhere to the firm guidelines on where people may relieve themselves.Transgender youth are particularly singled out. Raising considerable concern is the forced outing proposed by Senate Bill 86, which says school staff “may not withhold from a student's parent information related to the student's perception of the student's biological sex if that perception is inconsistent with the student's biological sex."
The bill also requires parental consent for clubs like the Gay-Straight Alliance, which has historically served as a safe space for LGBTQIA+ students. If these bills pass, Gov. Greg Abbott is likely to sign them into law. In February, at a convention of the Young Conservatives of Texas, Abbott spoke out against a Hebron High School teacher who wore a pink dress during the school's "spirit day" before being placed on administrative leave.
“What I do know are these two things: One is this person, a man, dressing as a woman, in a public high school in the state of Texas, he’s trying to normalize the concept that this type of behavior is OK,” Abbott said. “This type of behavior is not OK, and this is the type of behavior that we want to make sure we end in the state of Texas.”
Determining Teams
As governor, Abbott has signed into law other bills that restrict the rights of the transgender population. In 2021, the state passed a law that required high school student athletes to play on teams that correspond to the gender listed on the birth certificate issued at the time of their birth. The bill, House Bill 25, was proposed by Rep. Valoree Swanson, R-Spring, and this year she is back to build on her successes.For 2025, Swanson has come out swinging with House Bill 370, which would pull funding from sports events that allow transgender athletes to compete on the teams that align with a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth.
Rep. Janie Lopez, a Republican from Cameron, has filed House Bill 1123, which would introduce chromosomal testing for high school athletes. The testing, which critics have called invasive, would require all students competing in public school sports to undergo blood tests. But there’s a problem with banning transgender athletes based on their biochemistry — intersex students.
“This is a perfect example where we are talking about an extreme remedy to a situation that is not extreme,” said Erika Lorshbough, the executive director of interACT, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting intersex youth.
There are many intersex variants that would result in a gender classification that aligns neither with a person's identity nor with their physical presentation, explains Lorshbough.
“The fact is that there are absolutely young girls and young women playing on sports teams around the country who physically present as women, and they're going to find out that they are intersex,” said Lorshbough.
Drag Transgender Performers
Queens and Kings were outraged last year when the state passed Senate Bill 12, which attempted to ban drag performances in front of children. The bill specifically mentioned performers displaying as the opposite gender. A judge struck it down as “unconstitutional,” keeping it from becoming law.“But even if SB 12 were not unconstitutionally vague, it would still fail due to it being an impermissible prior restraint on speech,” the ruling from U.S. District Judge David Hittner states.
But some lawmakers are back this year with arguably the same vague verbiage. For 2025, House Bill 1075 targets anyone who “exhibits a gender that is different than the performer's gender recorded at birth using clothing, makeup, or other physical markers.”
Another filing, House Bill 938, allows minors in the presence of a drag performance to claim damages up to $5,000. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bills fail to recognize the existence of transgender performers.
