AUSTIN, Texas – On January 11, the second day of the Texas legislative session, Rep. Tony Tinderholt took the microphone to offer an amendment to a procedural resolution laying out the rules of the House of Representatives.
“Members, this amendment only says that if you want to be chairman of the committee in the Texas House, you must be able to emphasize the obvious fact that there are two genders,” Tinderholt on the floor of the House. “It’s sad to even say it now, but the push from the radical left has changed the reality.”
Photo by Montinique Monroe/Getty Images
For the next two hours, Tinderholt and his legislative ally Rep. Brian Slaton – two of the most conservative Republicans in the GOP-dominated legislature – pelted the House with a flurry of similar amendments.
One committee was banned from enforcing “speech codes that restrict the use of biologically correct pronouns”. Others prohibit members of the legislature or employees from stating pronouns in email signatures. Additionally, the duo tried to keep the House from taking steps to address the street system before voting on proposals to ban child gender reassignment and make it illegal to perform drag shows in front of minors.
All amendments failed, with House Speaker Dade Phelan, also a Republican, ruling that they had nothing to do with the rulemaking resolution in the discussion.
But the view set the tone for the battle to be waged through a series of legislative proposals aimed at restricting all aspects of life for transgender children in the country – a decade-long cultural war waged by the far-right that is gaining traction across the country. moderate republican.
Conservatives have filed at least 67 bills aimed at limiting new restrictions on LGBTQ Texans, according to a tally by a coalition of advocacy groups led by Equality Texas – above the previous state record of 33.
Some proposals zero in on medical care for children whose gender identity conflicts with the gender they were assigned at birth. The therapy is commonly described as “gender-affirming treatment” in medical circles.
One proposed law would reclassify various surgical procedures for minors’ gender transition as a criminal form of “genital mutilation” – an inflammatory and false way of describing these legal transition procedures, which are generally not available to minors.
People who seek medical treatment as young adults to align their gender identity with the gender they were assigned at birth begin with counseling and lab work. Most, especially in Texas, will struggle to find quality providers.
When doing so, a number of physical and psychological evaluations will be carried out, usually by a team of doctors, over a period of at least a few months. Changes in social cues like clothing mark the first step towards gender transition. But, for children, that’s usually where it stops.
Adolescents, usually after years of working with the medical team, can continue the treatment recommended in the current standard of care, such as reversible puberty blockers, possibly followed by reversible hormone treatment. Surgery is almost always an option for adults.
“They didn’t want other people to know us, so they made it up,” said Antonia D’Orsay, director of trans services with the Borrego Community Health Foundation in California. “The simple truth is that they are lying. It’s a scare tactic meant to confuse people.
However, advocates worry that legislation envisioned by the conservative wing of the Texas Republican could have chilling effects on medical providers if passed. For example, many proposed laws would classify as non-surgical forms of treatment for gender reassignment, including blocking puberty or hormone therapy.
“They didn’t want other people to know us, so they made it up.”
– Antonia D’Orsay, director of trans services with the Borrego Community Health Foundation
Another proposal aims to keep Texas trans people out of public life. One can rule, model in the “Don’t Say ‘Gay'” Bill passed last year in Floridawould bar schools from teaching materials “about sexual orientation or gender identity” to students from kindergarten through high school, although it is now uncommon for students whose parents are in same-sex relationships.
Texas law still mandates that state education materials intended for minors “state that homosexual conduct is not an acceptable lifestyle and is a criminal offense,” despite the fact that the US Supreme Court overturned a state law criminalizing gay sex in 2003.
And four separate legislators have filed several variations of the bill that would ban drag shows from allowing minors. The bill would impose similar restrictions on strip clubs in bars or restaurants that feature performers who “find a gender identity that differs from the performer’s assigned gender at birth.”
As written, the bill applies to Texas trans people who sing in public in front of more than two people – along with anyone who deviates beyond the most restrictive style standards, including performers like Kiss or Ted Nugent, for a long time. – hair day.
“The main goal is to limit transgender people from everything,” said Adri Pérez, organizer of the Texas Freedom Network (TFN). “It’s never about saving women’s sports. It’s never about bathrooms, and it’s not about protecting children. It’s all about making us fear for public life.
Trouble Winning For Rights?
The importance of bills targeting trans Texans has been a measure of the state’s hardcore conservative influence for years.
In 2017, when former President Donald Trump was inaugurated, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick forced the legislature into a special session in a hail mary effort to get a bill that would force people to use the bathroom assigned on their birth certificate.
Patrick, who still leads the state Senate, prioritized the bill throughout 2017 sessionWage personal war against the phantom men prowling the women’s bathroom.
But Gov. Greg Abbott let the bill die, keeping the issue at bay.
The Texas Legislature only holds regular sessions for six months every other year. As the 2019 session rolls around, former U.S. Representative Beto O’Rourke (D) is within 2.6 percentage points of unseating U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R).
The unexpected blue surge in a state where the GOP has won every state office since 1994 cost some state legislators on the far right of their seats. Punished Republicans spent the year focusing on bread-and-butter issues like tax reform and teacher pay raises. Neither Patrick nor Abbott made a fuss about trans issues.
In the 2020 presidential election, however, Texas is once again invigorated. Although Trump lost the election, the GOP gained ground in longtime Democratic strongholds in south Texas — a trend that continued in 2022, when O’Rourke lost his gubernatorial bid, this time by an 11-point margin.
With the resurgence of the right, Abbott has increasingly adopted culture war policies that target trans children.
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In 2021, he signed legislation requiring students in public and charter schools to compete in sports as the type assigned on the original birth certificate, the measure is directed to trans students. Last year, Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a legal opinion describing some gender-affirming treatments as “child abuse,” with Abbott cheering the move and directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents who seek such care.
Abbott’s interest in anti-trans measures coincides with a wave of legislation in more than two dozen other GOP-led states restricting gender-affirming treatment. Similar measures, like Florida’s “Don’t Say ‘Gay'” law, aim to prevent public discussions of gender in front of minors.
Texas conservatives tend to favor measures like this by wide margins. About 79% of Republicans oppose changing the gender on minors’ birth certificates, except in cases of clerical errors or atypical sex organs, according to a poll released Wednesday by the University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs. Seventy-three percent of Texas Republicans polled support legislation classifying gender-based treatment as “child abuse.”
Democratic voters disagreed with both measures. But strong support from conservatives and a significant minority of liberals means the general public likes him.
“It’s a winning issue for Republicans,” said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones. “It’s exactly the type of issue that the Republican base likes. And you don’t lose votes in November — you might even gain some. The people who feel strongly against these policies are the people who don’t vote Republican.
The question that will linger in the legislative session until it ends in May is how strongly Republicans like Abbott, Patrick or Phelan will take anti-trans measures.
Those figures, each of whom has significant power to kill bills or speed them up, will try to steer the party toward legislation they consider more symbolic, Jones said.
Enacting a law that equates gender-affirming treatment with child abuse will open the country up to litigation. Laws limiting parents’ ability to change their child’s gender on a birth certificate, for example, would have less practical effect because few people take that step at that age.
But what conservative politicians see as symbolic threatens to have a devastating impact on children and parents struggling to make the best decisions for their health.
“There are many better things that can be done,” said Pérez, the organizer of the TFN, then added, “Are we really going to allow the values of the Republic to get in the way of best practice medicine supported by years of science?”