Texas conservatives plan to further restrict trans lives this legislative session

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

---

Eight years ago, when conservative state lawmakers tried to restrict what bathrooms trans people could use, moderate Republicans quietly killed the bill in a special session.

Less than a decade later, that seems like a distant memory. The far-right now has the Legislature firmly in its grip and, emboldened by the recent election, they’re gearing up to make growing trans animus the social issue of the session.

Nationwide, Republicans have successfully pushed these laws as a way to protect children, by prohibiting them from medically transitioning before they turn 18 and stopping trans students from playing on sports teams that don’t align with their biological sex.

Texas has so far marched in lockstep with its conservative cousins in passing laws aimed at children. But some lawmakers want to further restrict the lives of trans adults as well, filing bills about bathroom use, gender identity markers on official documents and funding for gender reassignment surgery.

“The American people and especially Texans that I represent, they’ve had enough of it,” Rep. Brian Harrison, an arch-conservative from Midlothian, told The Texas Tribune. “They’re forcing you to celebrate something that’s at odds with objective reality, and in many instances, forcing tax dollars to fund it.”

The limit on how far Texas will go on this issue lies in the hands of conservative lawmakers, as the state is unlikely to face federal pushback as they did during the Biden administration. Incoming President Donald Trump has vowed to get Congress to pass a bill declaring there are only two genders, and to keep “transgender insanity the hell out of our schools.”

“I don’t see any reason the state would moderate its position at this point,” said Andrew Proctor, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who studies LGBTQ political issues. “If anything, the things they want to pursue will be easier now.”

A message is born

In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, and conservatives began casting around for a new social issue to back. They landed on the small but growing trans population, and the incremental discrimination protections they’d gained during the Obama administration.

The next year, in 2017, there were a few dozen anti-trans bills filed in state houses across the country. Many, like Texas' bathroom bill, failed. At that time, 57% of Republicans said society had gone “too far” in accepting trans people.

Then, they honed in on children. Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, a right-wing political advocacy group, helped shape the messaging around this issue. He said conservatives are willing to be “polite” to people who identify as trans — to a point.

“Once you go into my daughter's athletics or in her locker room or showers, once you start giving kids gender transitions that mutilate them and sterilize them, then we're in a whole different world,” he told The Texas Tribune after the election.

All major medical associations acknowledge that gender dysphoria, the distress someone can feel when their physical presentation doesn’t match the gender they identify as, is a real medical condition best treated with gender-affirming care. That can range from social transition, in which someone goes by different pronouns or dresses differently, to medical treatments, including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries. Minors rarely undergo surgery to transition, and all decisions are made in consultation with their parents and medical professionals.

Nonetheless, the conservative messaging resonated. Last year, almost 80% of Republicans said society had gone too far in accepting trans people, and this year, even with Texas laying dormant, there were 669 anti-trans bills filed in state legislatures across the country.

But despite this sharp increase in anti-trans sentiment, it’s not entirely clear what Americans want their government to do about it. More than half of Republicans do not want to ban gender-affirming care for minors, and almost as many want to protect trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces.

Texas’ ban on gender-affirming care for minors was widely condemned by medical associations, doctors, advocates and trans people, who called the laws “dangerous,” “cruel and grotesque,” and “devastating.” Every Republican, and a handful of Democrats, voted for the ban.

Now, trans people, advocates and health care providers are bracing for what comes next.

“It's almost necessary, based on their framework and the way they frame these cases, that they would argue that access to care for adults would be a violation in the same way as for children,” said Elana Redfield, the federal policy director at the Williams Institute, a research center on gender identity law and public policy at the University of California Los Angeles. “Texas has already made it pretty clear they intend to do that.”

The next frontier

In 2024, an off year for the Texas Legislature, other Republican states charged ahead, setting the agenda for what lawmakers might do when they reconvene in January. No state has fully banned adults from accessing gender-affirming care, but some, such as Florida, have significantly restricted the provision of these treatments, discouraging doctors and patients alike.

Texas lawmakers are already filing bills to tee up these issues. Sen. Bob Hall, a Republican from Edgewood, and Rep. Ellen Troxclair, an Austin Republican, have filed bills requiring government records to reflect that there are only two genders, tightly defining male and female based on reproductive organs. Other bills would prevent trans people from amending their birth certificates to reflect their gender identity.

These laws have the effect of “erasing transgender people altogether,” Redfield said. Some of this is already under way: Earlier this year, the Texas Department of Public Safety, under scrutiny from Attorney General Ken Paxton, began refusing to change the sex listed on someone’s driver’s license, even with a court order. The agency also began compiling names of people seeking the change.

Lawmakers are also hoping to resurrect the bathroom issue, as well as requiring trans people to be placed in jails or prisons based on the sex they were assigned at birth.

Harrison, the Midlothian Republican, has filed a bill that would forbid state funding to be used for transition-related care.

This idea gained traction during the presidential election, when Trump accused Vice President Kamala Harris of supporting taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgery. In a small number of cases, federal inmates have won court battles that required the federal government to pay for their transition-related medical care.

Harrison said his focus is purely about how tax dollars are spent, and it’s the media who portrays these as social issues.

“We are making the lives harder for Texans of all stripes when we make them poorer, and we certainly shouldn’t make them poorer in the pursuit of leftist ideology,” he said.

Federal shifts

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s gender-affirming care ban for minors, a case that could determine how far states like Texas can go with these restrictions. The U.S. Department of Justice sued in 2023, saying the law unconstitutionally discriminates on the basis of gender.

The suit was one of several attempts by the Biden administration to insulate trans people from the impacts of conservative state laws.

“The Biden administration has been the most explicitly protective administration for transgender people,” Redfield said. “We can anticipate the incoming president will claw back as much of that as possible.”

In his first term, Trump ejected trans people from the military and reversed many Obama-era discrimination protections. In his recent presidential campaign, he ran heavily on this record, culminating in an ad that said “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Project 2025, the policy blueprint created by the conservative Heritage Foundation that many hope Trump will pull from, calls for removing “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from all federal rules, regulations and legislation, and restricting gender-affirming care across age groups.

Trans people and advocates are preparing for what Congress and the White House might do, as well as where state legislatures might go without federal oversight to rein them in. Many groups are recommending trans people proactively change their government documents to align with their gender identity, where that’s still allowed; stock up on transition-related medications; and prepare to move states or leave the country, if needed.

Whatever Trump does on this issue, Texas is expected to go even further.

“Texas better do at least as good a job as Washington, D.C. is going to do on that front,” Harrison said. “And that’s what I’m committed to ensuring happens.”