Republican Legislatures Enact Harshest Anti-Trans Bills Yet
Leading Off: Idaho and Tennessee move forward with harsh anti-trans bills and other states follow, the IOC bans transgender athletes. The top story lines as we start off the week.
by Assigned Media
Republican-led legislatures continue to escalate the severity of anti-trans bills. Just this week we have seen two of the most extreme bills yet coming out of Idaho and Tennessee, with Idaho to issue a blanket bathroom ban statewide, and Tennessee issuing orders to track the personal information of people seeking gender affirming care.
Idaho’s bill, HB 752, which passed the legislature on Friday, seeks to ban trans people from not just bathrooms in government facilities, but also from bathrooms in private businesses, which, in effect, would ban trans people from all bathrooms except those in private residences. The bill lays out that penalties for violation of this law be a misdemeanor and up to a year jail time for a first offence, and a felony charge and up to five years in prison for a second offence.
Either of these penalties would also put trans people at further risk of abuse in a hostile prison system, which typically assigned prisoners based on the gender they were assigned at birth, which exacerbates their risk of becoming a target for abuse and sexual assault.
In effect, this ban would criminalize trans people for simply existing in the state.
Meanwhile, Tennessee passed a bill on Thursday seeking to build a framework for surveillance of trans people and their medical care. The bill, HB 754, would require all gender affirming care providers across the state to report specific and detailed medical information on their patients for the Department of Health to publish publicly. While the bill’s required information doesn’t include identifying information, The Advocate reports that the information it does require could easily out people with simple cross referencing of other publicly available information.
It has been noted that the information gender affirming care providers are required to disclose would likely put them in violation of HIPAA.
Other egregious bills have been proposed, such as SB 351 in Kentucky which sought to revoke trans teachers’ licenses based on decades old definitions from the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and would empower the Teaching Board to investigate any complaints that a teacher may be in violation. This bill was listed as withdrawn from the Kentucky legislature as of Thursday.
The International Olympic Committee has enacted a ban barring trans women from competing in the Olympics as women. The ban would require all female athletes to undergo genetic testing to determine their sex.
While this ban is targeted at transgender athletes, there is only one known case of a trans woman openly competing in the Olympics, weightlifter Laurel Hubbard in 2020. Rather, it is likely that it will more heavily impact intersex athletes and athletes with disorders of sexual development, who may not even be aware of it until receiving the mandatory testing.
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