Texas lawmakers vote to ban trans people from public restrooms that match their gender identity
Texas lawmakers voted late Wednesday to ban transgender people from public restrooms that match their gender identity, sending the measure to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott after nearly a decade of failed attempts.
Texas Senate Bill 8 bars transgender people from using multiple-occupancy bathrooms and changing rooms that align with their identity in schools and government-owned buildings. It mandates that inmates in state custody are housed according to their “biological sex,” and bans transgender women from women’s domestic violence shelters, unless they are the dependent of a cisgender woman also receiving services.
The bill sets a $25,000 violation for jurisdictions and government agencies that violate the new policy, and a $125,000 fine for a second offense. Each day of continued violation constitutes a separate infraction, according to the bill.
Texas state Sen. Mayes Middleton (R), the bill’s primary sponsor, called the measure “the strongest Women’s Privacy Act in America.”
“Texas will not bend to the woke left’s gender delusions, and we will not allow men into women’s private spaces,” Middleton, who is running to replace state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), wrote late Wednesday in a post on the social platform X.
Texas senators passed S.B. 8 in August, during the second of two special sessions called by Abbott amid a lengthy standoff between state lawmakers over redistricting. House lawmakers advanced the bill overwhelmingly last week, sending it back to the Senate for approval after increasing the measure’s financial penalties.
In a statement issued after S.B. 8 passed the Texas House on Aug. 28, Ash Hall, a policy and advocacy strategist at the ACLU of Texas, said it is “unconscionable and unconstitutional” to bar transgender people from facilities that match their gender identity.
The law, they said, would also encourage “gender policing” in public spaces, putting at risk anyone “who doesn’t seem masculine or feminine enough to a random stranger, including the cisgender girls and women this bill purports to protect.”
Reports in recent months allege several women who are not transgender have been harassed in public restrooms because they were suspected of being trans, including in states without bathroom bans. In August, a Minnesota teenager said she was followed into the women’s restroom of a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant and made to lift her shirt to “prove” she was a girl.
Laws adopted by nearly half the nation bar transgender people from using bathrooms and facilities consistent with their gender identity in government-owned buildings, K-12 schools or colleges and universities.
President Trump’s administration has sought to enforce restrictions on restroom and locker room usage in schools federally, threatening funding for states and school districts that allow transgender students to access facilities that do not match their sex at birth.