Legislative barrage renewed at LGBTQ
Bills in new session target drag shows, transgender kids
Civil rights advocates are gearing up for another contentious session at the Texas Capitol, where Republican leaders are again pursuing a slate of measures that target members of the LGBTQ community.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the president of the Senate, released a list of 30 priority bills last week, including proposals to stop children from attending drag shows; to remove “obscene” books from school libraries; to prevent transgender children from obtaining gender-affirming care; and to ban transgender athletes from participating in college sports that align with their gender identity.
Republicans say the measures will shield children from inappropriate or sexualized content, and they argue the sports ban is necessary to keep a level playing field. But opponents argue they will harm an already-vulnerable community that has been caught in the middle of misinformation campaigns and culture wars.
“I think most Texans want to live in a free and fair state, where the government is not attacking us, our families or our kids,” said Brian Klosterboer, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. “The Texas Senate in recent years has been obsessed with bullying LGBTQ youth, especially those who are transgender. In the last couple of years, transgender youth in Texas have been under constant attack from the government.”
Texas lawmakers proposed dozens of LGBTQ restrictions in the 2021 legislative session, and this year’s tally has already reached 72, according to a bill tracker put together by the advocacy group Equality Texas.
Klosterboer said the proposals are not only harmful but unconstitutional — and the ACLU and other civil rights groups would stop them from taking effect if they advanced.
LGBTQ rights activists flooded the Texas Capitol during the 2021 legislative session, when
lawmakers passed a ban on transgender K-12 athletes competing on teams that match their gender identity.
That year, the Legislature also debated a bill to classify genderaffirming care, such as puberty blockers and hormone therapies, as child abuse. The measure failed in the House, but last year Republican Gov. Greg Abbott began ordering the state’s child welfare agency to investigate parents who allow their kids to receive the medical care as possible abusers. The directive has been put on hold amid a pair of lawsuits.
State Sen. Donna Campbell, a New Braunfels Republican who has authored one of several bills this session to ban gender-affirming care, said she believes it’s what’s right for Texas children.
“This is the right solution, the compassionate solution, and the solution that recognizes the reality of the science of adolescent care,” Campbell said. “Just as minors may not legally get tattooed in Texas, due to their life-altering permanence, we must recognize that children are simply not prepared to make similar life-altering decisions about their gender and bodies.”
Most major professional medical organizations support evidence-based care for genderaffirming care. The American Medical Association says it has been linked to dramatically reduced rates of suicide attempts, a decrease in depression and anxiety and reduced drug use.
Johnathan Gooch, spokesman for Equality Texas, said lawmakers should pay attention to how even just debating these bills can have a grave impact on LGBTQ youths’ mental health.
A 2022 Trevor Project study found that 47 percent of LGBTQ youths considered suicide that year and 16 percent had attempted it.
“If our lawmakers were truly interested in protecting youth, then they need to find ways to protect LGBTQ young people because the campaigns they’ve been running against them have been really harmful and really painful for everyone,” he said.
Some Republicans are also hoping to crack down on children’s access to drag shows. State Rep. Jared Patterson, RFrisco, filed one measure that would bar children from these performances.
His bill, HB643, would categorize any establishment that hosts drag shows as a “sexually oriented business” under state law, which would block anyone under 18 from attending and also subject business owners to a $5 tax per customer.
“When it comes to sexually explicit content, we have got to keep our kids away from it,” Patterson told Fox 4 Dallas-Fort Worth last month. “Whether that’s in the school library, whether that’s in the curriculum, whether that’s at a drag show, no matter where that is in society, we should be focused on protecting our kids, protecting their mental health and well-being.”
Some lawmakers are also intent on reining in what they see as inappropriate content in school library books. The push comes as these debates are roiling local school boards where conservative groups are demanding certain books, often relating to issues of race, gender and sexuality, be reviewed or removed from shelves.
One such bill filed by state Rep. Tom Oliverson, R-Cypress, would require publishers to use a content rating system, similar to that used for movies, indicating the most appropriate age range for the material in order to sell books to a Texas school.
“Parents should not have to worry about what their children may be reading in school,” Oliverson said in a tweet Wednesday.
The majority of Texans, or 71 percent, support the idea, including 90 percent of Republicans and 54 percent of Democrats, according to the Hobby School study.
PEN America, a free expression advocacy nonprofit, found that Texas schools had banned 801 books, more than any other state in the country, between July 2021 and June 2022.
“Book banning and educational gag orders are two fronts in an all-out war on education and the open discussion and debate of ideas in America,” the organization said in its report. “Students have First Amendment rights to access information and ideas in schools, and these bans and legislative shifts pose clear threats to those rights.”
Though GOP lawmakers have been debating all of these bills for years, they have renewed energy to pursue them after last year’s midterm elections, said Renée Cross, the senior executive director at the Hobby School of Public Affairs.
“They swept those offices, and by larger numbers than some of them won in 2018,” she said. “With those types of solid victories, I think that gave them the freedom to come out and pursue even more conservative legislation.”