Texas Invites Everyone to Police Gender
A bigoted measure “defining sex” raises confusion and sows fear. That’s the point.
by Valorie Van-Dieman
A Texas measure that defines gender as based solely on reproductive organs at birth doesn’t address a host of questions that naturally arise.
And that’s the point, analysts say, because the measure is intended in large part to sow fear among trans people and promote a broad culture of exclusion, a trademark of anti-trans legislation in the state over the past several years.
The bill passed in the waning days of the legislative session, and Gov. Greg Abbott has promised to sign it. The ACLU of Texas called it “a cruel and targeted attempt to erase trans, nonbinary, and intersex Texans from public life” and said it could have far-reaching implications.
“It's really about controlling people's lives, controlling who has access to what space,” Kye Campell-Fox, a researcher at Michigan State University and manager of the Trans-ilience Research Lab, said in an interview with Assigned Media.
He and his colleagues published a study last year in The Journal of Transgender Health that examined the tactics and the human impact of anti-trans legislation in Texas, where right-wing lawmakers have pushed a torrent of bills.
“Legislation like this encourages people to feel entitled to comment on other people's gender,” Campbell-Fox said. “For example, someone might be going out to a bar to order a drink, when someone says, ‘Oh, well, this ID can't be real because you can't really have this gender marker.’”
The measure spells out no enforcement or application mechanisms, which is stirring confusion and leaving the door open for abuse.
More than 120,000 people in Texas are trans, according to recent estimates, and an untold number had gone to court over the years to obtain orders changing their gender marker. What happens to them now, for example?
The bill could, for example, add teeth to a discriminatory but non-binding directive from the attorney general, Ken Paxton, that sought to bar state agencies from changing gender markers on documents like driver’s licenses. Paxton, who has led the state government’s anti-trans campaign, could also use the new measure to force people to revert to their old gender markers upon renewal.
Mismatched documents are a likely, if not inevitable result of the state’s bigoted campaign. The potential for costly document changes hits extra hard for queer people who are twice as likely to be living in poverty.
While this measure, set to take effect Sept. 1, targets trans people, it harms many other Texans as well.
“We've seen so many instances of people who are cisgender being harassed,” Campbell-Fox said. “It’s scary for someone who is now being forced to show a license that they could face harassment or even be detained by someone saying ‘that can't be your license’ because it doesn't match your presentation.”
Measures like this seek to enforce strict gender norms, legitimize unscientific definitions of gender, and force anyone not within those definitions out of public life.
“The legal ramifications are concerning, of course, but when it's normalized to say everyone can police someone else's gender, everyone gets to have an opinion on someone else's body, I think that is even more terrifying than just the letter of the law.”
Scenarios like that play out time and time again, profoundly affecting queer and gender nonconforming people. Imane Khelif, the Olympic champion boxer, has been targeted with a tidal wave of abuse by anti-trans campaigners like Riley Gaines, JK Rowling, and Elon Musk.
The perversity of these discriminatory measures was evident in a May 6 episode in South Carolina, when a trans man was detained for using a women’s restroom, despite the F gender marker present on his ID.
The cis man who followed him into the women’s restroom and looked over the top of his stall faced no consequences.
The right-wing’s bigoted fever is keenly felt in Texas, where a record-breaking 130 anti-trans bills were introduced this year. The Texas Tribune reported that fewer than 10 measures passed, but in many ways that, too, is the point of right wing’s campaign
“The quantity and the breadth of the bills are designed to exhaust trans people and our allies,” Campbell-Fox said.
Valorie Van-Dieman (she/they) is a reporter and editorial assistant at Assigned Media. @valorievandieman.bsky.social