Texas lawmakers, late Wednesday, voted to prohibit transgender individuals from using public restrooms that align with their gender identity, advancing the bill to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott after nearly ten years of unsuccessful attempts.
The legislation, Texas Senate Bill 8, prevents transgender people from accessing multiple-occupancy bathrooms and changing rooms that align with their gender identity in schools and government-owned buildings. It requires that inmates in state custody be assigned housing according to their “biological sex” and excludes transgender women from women’s domestic violence shelters unless they are dependents of a cisgender woman who is also receiving services.
The bill imposes a $25,000 fine on jurisdictions and government agencies violating the new policy, with a $125,000 penalty for second infractions. Each day of continued violation counts as a separate offense, according to the legislation.
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,” wrote Middleton, who is campaigning to succeed state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), in a post on the social platform X late Wednesday.
In August, Texas senators passed S.B. 8 during the second of two special sessions summoned by Abbott amid a protracted standoff between state lawmakers over redistricting. Last week, House lawmakers decisively advanced the bill, sending it back to the Senate for confirmation after raising the measure’s financial penalties.
Ash Hall, a policy and advocacy strategist at the ACLU of Texas, stated after S.B. 8 passed the Texas House on Aug. 28, that it is “unconscionable and unconstitutional” to prevent transgender individuals from using facilities that correspond with 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.
