Republicans Are ‘Running Out of States’ to Pass New Transgender Restrictions
State legislatures are ending their sessions this spring with only a handful of new restrictions for transgender people on the books, a departure from the previous two years when passing such legislation became a major focus in Republican-dominated state capitols.
In interviews, conservative strategists and transgender rights advocates offered several reasons for the sudden slowdown. In part, they said, Republican state lawmakers had such a high success rate for bills limiting transgender rights in the earlier years that they had covered a lot of ground already. “We’re running out of states to pass things in,” said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, a national conservative advocacy group.
The smaller number may reflect an election-year recognition among Republican lawmakers that voters may rank gender identity issues below the economy, inflation and jobs. Republican leaders in the Georgia House of Representatives told reporters this spring that they had chosen to focus on “kitchen table” issues, such as an income-tax cut and funding for prekindergarten programs.
Of 28 states where Republicans control the legislature, 24 now prohibit or restrict medical professionals from providing hormone therapies for gender transition to minors; 24 bar transgender students from participating in sports that align with their gender identity; and 12 bar students from using school bathrooms that do not match their sex assigned at birth, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group that tracks state-level legislation. Most of those laws were passed before this year’s legislative sessions.
In some Republican-led states where such measures had not already passed, lawmakers pushed for them in this year’s sessions. Bans on transition treatments for minors were enacted this year in Wyoming and South Carolina, and Ohio lawmakers overrode Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of a ban they had passed late last year.
In Idaho, lawmakers made it illegal for school districts to require that teachers use pronouns consistent with a student’s gender identity. A new Tennessee law requires schools to alert parents if their child requests to go by a name or pronoun different from those entered on school forms. And the governors of Louisiana and Idaho signed legislation specifying that the term “sex” in state code refers to “an individual’s biological sex, either male or female” and that “gender identity” should not be considered a synonym for it.
