March 26, 2024
Anti-Trans Legislation in the U.S.: Outlook and Our Power
The Current Landscape
For nearly a decade now, the U.S. has seen an enormous uptick in anti-trans legislation. This year, 2024 broke all previous records; nearly 500 anti-trans bills have been proposed this year, and it’s only March. Nearly 400 of these bills were proposed in January alone. Many of these bills are reintroductions of bills that died in previous legislative sessions, but a significant portion are newly introduced.
What These Bills are Attacking
These bills can generally be broken up into four categories: Healthcare, Education, Public Accomodations, and Weakening Civil Rights which encompasses documentation, employment, and more.
Healthcare
The anti-healthcare bills we’ve seen introduced and many which have passed not only deny Trans folks access to life saving and vital gender affirming medical care, they typically also criminalize providers, institutions and individuals involved in providing or receiving such care. Depending on the bill, criminalization can take the form of fines, designations as a criminal offense as well as possible incarceration, revocation of licensure, institutional funding cuts, and more.
Education
The anti-education bills that have been introduced and many which have passed target the educational system in various ways, and there is significant overlap with Sports Bills. Some bills target our speech in educational settings, denying students, faculty, and staff the right to use the names and pronouns that align with their identity. Some target trans folks’ access to restrooms, changing rooms and sports teams aligned with their gender identity. Most of these bills force trans folks’ to out themselves in some way or another, and stoke the violence our trans community already faces. Many bills also seek to criminalize individuals or institutions that do not implement these deeply violent and atrociously transphobic legislation.
Sports
These bills typically target Trans youth grades K-12 and prohibit them from playing sports, or accessing restrooms or lockers aligned with their true gender. Sports bills seek to target, out, dehumanize, and, in some cases, criminalize Trans students for being Trans. Like Education bills, many of these bills are using the access point of sports to uniformly define ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ which will have long reaching sweeping repercussions on our rights as Trans people. None of the definitions put forth in any of this legislation is accurate or backed by science, and aims to continue reducing our rights, dignity, and humanity.
Weakening Civil Rights
While this category of anti-trans bills is the most general and far reaching, it doesn’t differ much from the other categories in its scope of impact. These bills attempt to redefine ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, again using unscientific and purely transphobic language. By redefining how we are allowed to move through the world in our identity, these bills subsequently seek to reduce or eliminate our protections as citizens by removing our ability to legally identify ourselves through documentation, and preemptively eliminate pathways to protection from discrimination or defamation, and violence.
Information is Power
The following bills which have passed both houses and their respective states are listed below:
- Ohio HB 68 (signed into law)
- Tennessee HB 878 (signed into law)
- Utah HB 0275 (signed into law)
- Utah HB 0172
- Florida HB 1425
- Wisconsin AB 510
- Wyoming SF 0009
- Wisconsin AB 4765 (vetoed)
It’s important to know what legislation has passed and how it will impact you in your home state. The ACLU Legislative Tracker and Trans Legislative Tracker are good resources for more information on your home state.
We are More Powerful Than We Know
Objectively, this is a terrifying landscape to be starting down. It’s painful, and scary, and dehumanizing, and awful. But it’s also a signal to us. That they’ve noticed our power. The power we wield in our resilience, our brilliance, and the absolute marvel of who we are. And they are scared. They are scared of our power and they’re coming for us the only way they know how. But we have better and more adaptive tools that don’t rest in the crux of white supremacy, but which rely on our collective care for one another. They will try to strip us of our dignity but they can’t take back what they never gave. We are too powerful for them, and we will continue our beautiful existence in collective care and vibrancy and love of ourselves and one another.