The midterm elections showed that most Americans aren’t fans of the Republican anti-trans crusade. But that’s not stopping GOP politicians across the country from pushing legislation that will strip trans people of basic rights and vital health care.
Already this year, GOP politicians in 30 states have put forward 155 different bills banning gender-affirming care for trans youth, criminalizing drag shows, and forcing trans athletes in high schools to compete on teams that don’t match their gender identity.
And they’re not slowing down. Here are some of the recent bills introduced by GOP legislators in states across the country.
TEXAS
In Texas, where Republicans won themselves a few more seats in the state legislature in the midterms, several bills have been introduced in recent days that would make it child abuse to give trans kids gender-affirming care. This is on top of governor Greg Abbot ordering state welfare officials to investigate parents of trans kids and report them to the state.
Another bill would make it a criminal offense to allow minors to see a drag show. The bill defines any organization that hosts a drag show of any kind as a “sexually oriented business” legally equivalent to a strip club. The bill characterizes drag broadly as any show in which a performer “exhibits a gender identity that is different than the performer’s gender assigned at birth” while performing in front of an audience. This would presumably include not only Drag Queen Story Hours but also any show featuring a trans actor in any capacity.
OHIO
In Ohio, Republicans have recently revised a bill that would have dramatically curtailed healthcare for LGBTQ+ people. While the revised bill is intended to look like a “compromise” of sorts, trans activists say it is no such thing. Activist Cam Ogden told News 5 Cleveland that the bill is “a shameful attempt at appearing to compromise while actually still functionally banning gender-affirming care for new patients.” The bill would also set up what would essentially be a registry for trans youth in the state by forcing doctors to release private medical information about their trans patients.
TENNESSEE
Last week the Republicans introduced a bill that would make it a criminal offense for venues to host any “adult cabaret performers” that could be viewed by minors. The bill applies to a variety of performers ranging from strippers to “male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest,” whatever that means. Offenders could be jailed for up to a year.
State Republicans have also introduced the so-called “Protecting Children from Gender Mutilation Act” that would not only prohibit gender surgery for minors but also puberty blockers.
VIRGINIA
On Tuesday, a Republican legislator introduced a bill to bar trans girls from competing against other girls in school sports competitions. The bill would require all school sports participants to provide
identification of the student’s biological sex on an athletics eligibility form signed by a licensed physician, nurse practitioner or physician assistant to be submitted by any such student who desires to try out for or participate in an interscholastic, intercollegiate, intramural or club athletic team or sport. The bill prohibits any such team or sport that is expressly designated for females, women or girls from being open to students whose biological sex is male.
ILLINOIS
These are just the latest legislative attempt to curtail trans rights. And we can expect many more to come.
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The party of small government that stays out of people’s business, folks.
This is my non-shocked face.
The party of small government that stays out of people’s business, folks.
Also the Party Against Restroom Harassment—which, by some sleight-of-mind, they manage to reconcile with being the Party Who Reserves The Right To Inspect Your Daughter’s Junk If She Fails To Meet Our Arbitrary Girliness Standard. Such As Being Too Good At Sports. Especially Being Too Good At Sports While Being The Wrong Color.
why do they hate us so much as to tell such baldfaced lies?
what did we even DO?
What’s even the point of this? These attacks are massively unpopular so it’s not like it helps them politically. It just seems like cartoonish supervillainy for its own sake.
German here. We tried that thing where you register a certain group of people and exclude them from professions. Things got worse from there. Lists are not harmless. They are a tool of genocide. These bills are trans genocide bills. I wonder if their authors can be tried in the Hague. Alan? Do you know? Stay safe, everyone.
I fully realise that not being American I might have missed a whole heap of signposts, but bear with me. I see nothing here about identifying or excluding the myriad of cross-dressing performers of any kind.
Traditional pantomimes, idiotic amateur stage shows at lifesaver or footy clubs and a lot of other fairly harmless fun, see The Goodies, Life of Brian, Monty Python, Randy Rainbow in a range of venues and media. Most of these and similar acts are utterly daft even when their humour misses the mark. The day that overt conscious silliness in a Mary Poppins hat can , even theoretically, be an arrestable offence is not one anybody should welcome.
@Seth: We exist. That seems to be too much.
Stay safe out there, folx.
Wow, I hope every school play in Texas always has enough boys, so that the school doesn’t get shut down for having a girl play the Artful Dodger. I hope no all-boys school wants to put on any play at all!
The party of small government and person freedoms is once again neither.
Oh of course it’s Darren Bailey who sponsored the IL bill. He’s under the impression losing his face for governor gives him some kind of rightwing nutjob standing.
It occurs to me that this
Would prohibit panto, which is daft fun for children which traditionally has cross-dressing, and isn’t common in the US, but would also prohibit plays like Twelfth Night, a ‘respectable’ Shakespeare play which also involves cross-dressing.
Any show or play that requires the performers to cross-dress, trans actors in any play or show where they perform a character of their gender, and drag acts, would be banned under this act. It’s fairly obviously aimed at drag acts, which is bad enough, but the collateral damage will be huge.
@ daughter
I think in practical terms there would be difficulties with genocide.
The ICC definition of genocide is:
The highlighted bit would seem the most applicable.
However genocide is only applicable to a “national, ethnic, racial or religious group”
But, the Rome Statute has other offences. Including
At first blush, that seems applicable. However gender is very narrowly defined in the statute.
Now you could make arguments about “the context of society” to say things have moved on from the strict binary. But the ICC tends to apply a general ‘average’ world standard.
The ICC though very much applies a ‘living document’ rather than originalist approach though; so there is some hope as to the offence evolving.
But the biggest hurdle is that the US isn’t a signatory to the ICC; so they don’t recognise its jurisdiction. The only way to get a non party before the court is by resolution of the Security Council; and of course the US is a permanent member and would exercise its veto.
As it happens though, and without going into too much detail, I might be doing some work with the ICC, so if the opportunity arises I’ll see what the prosecutors think.
@oncewasmagnificent
One focus of the protests against Life of Brian was Terry Jones playing Mandy in drag, and protesters insisted it was against the Bible. Wonder what they thought of Milton Berle.
As @RJ Dragon pointed out, drag shows and performers with non-cis gender identities are just the tip of the iceberg. “Trouser/pants/breeches roles” or “travesti” parts where a female singer is playing a juvenile male character abound in opera, for example.
Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro? Hansel in Hansel and Gretel? Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier? Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus, and dozens of others? All male characters, written for and almost invariably performed by female singers.
Apropos of which, I notice that in January 2023 Houston Grand Opera is scheduled to present Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, with unambiguously cisgender-female-identified soprano Lauren Snouffer cast as Cherubino. A blatant example of a performer exhibiting a gender identity that is different than the performer’s gender assigned at birth!
Let’s hope some civic-minded Texans decide to make this a test case for the Texas bill, or at least talk up its potential violation of the bill. I’d love to see rich white Texan opera aficionados having to publicly butt heads with rich white Texan transphobes about whether a female soprano should be allowed to sing Cherubino, and how or why that’s fundamentally different from a drag show.
Oh, and also: That Texas bill about gender identity in performance will absolutely hamstring the many school and community theater companies which routinely cast female actors in male parts because their talent pool skews more female than their cast of characters.
Let’s see some Texas Pubs trying to explain to indignant girls in high school theater clubs why they’re not allowed to play Edwardian newsboys in a production of Newsies. Or why the local Shakespeare troupe can’t put female actors in beards and boots to fill out the supporting and ensemble parts that they don’t have enough male actors to cast.
I’m definitely looking forward to the footage of those protest marches. If you thought pissing off Houston opera fans was a bad idea, wait till you see how the rank and file theater geeks react.
@Seth They need a distraction. They can’t or won’t solve any of the real problems that people face, so they’re inventing a problem so they can “solve” that.
When I was 11 I got my first kiss and it was because I was in an acting camp during the summer. I got cast for a boys role because there weren’t enough boys and I ended up having a stage kiss with a 12 year old girl. After the first time we kissed on stage, she found me afterwards and told me “good actor, bad kisser. Iet me show you how to do it right ” and I in the middle of a gay panic was like
“Uh okay… Pretty lady” while the shade of a tomatoes.
These bill would make shit like that illegal
What about animation, I wonder? If you don’t have blatantly cross-dressing characters like Bugs Bunny, you have cross-cast voices, so that male characters like Bart Simpson are played by women…
Live-action Peter Pan is canceled.
America is becoming fascist.
I remembered Katy Perry Hot and Cold video where there was a member of the LGBTQ community holding a dog and their facial expressions when the fiancé refused to say I do.
I guess America has devolved.
Lady Gaga and her videos supported LGBTQ actors too.
@Cane Toad
The US is not becoming fascist; it has been all along, starting with the genocidal wars of occupation and large-scale slaving that it was founded on.
@ Alan: Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. I meant it seriously, but I was afraid it sounded like hyperbole.
This stuff is really scary. So far it doesn’t seem to have spread to Virginia, but with the absolute lunatics on the supreme court that’s only a matter of time. We’ve been trying to talk about the coming genocide for a while now, but every time we do we’re treated as if we’re over reacting.
We’re not, and we haven’t ever been. All of these bills are about trans genocide, that is their primary effect and their goal.
@ daughter
My pleasure.
Sorry it isn’t the best news. Having said that though, I am a big fan of strategic litigation.
That is to say, trying to push the envelope in law to address lacunas and expand protections to people.
That is even more of an option though in international law. A lot of the concepts we now take for granted were considered very novel, and indeed controversial, when they were first promulgated. Nuremberg clarified a lot of previously nebulous or untested potential offences; although a lot of what we now call ‘war crimes’ first arose in the Tokyo Tribunal. So there is a lot of precedent in international law for introducing new protections.
I don’t want to compare trans people to art (although people vs art is very topical at the moment with some of the climate change protests) but people pushed for protections of cultural heritage; and now there are a number of new offences covering that.
So it’s always worth agitating for expanded protections in international law. Not necessarily with the ICC, but for example, in Europe the ECHR is specifically referred to as ‘a floor not a ceiling’ so adapting to developing issues is sort of baked in.
Of course the US position is somewhat different. Especially as originalism is such a strong philosophy there. But even so it’s worth pushing. It is a long struggle. But there’s a saying in jurisprudence “The dissents eventually become the settled law.”