Texas Senate shuts trans people out of bathrooms, domestic abuse shelters

AUSTIN (CN) — The Texas Senate advanced a broad bill Wednesday that would exclude transgender people from their preferred gender-specific spaces in the name of protecting women’s privacy.

Senate Bill 7, sponsored by Republican Senator Mayes Middleton, passed by a 19-2 vote on Wednesday afternoon. SB 7 would require any political subdivision of the state — including cities, counties and school districts — to ensure that people can only access multiple-occupancy public restrooms that match their sex assigned at birth.

Bills like SB 7, often known as “bathroom bills," have emerged across the United States and around the world in recent years, starting with North Carolina’s 2016 ban.

The policies have become a major part of the broader Republican efforts to restrict the rights of transgender Americans by forcing them to abide by the sex they were assigned at birth. In addition to bills passed at the state level, the Trump administration has issued several executive orders along similar lines.

As with Middleton’s bill, the Trump administration’s executive orders purport to protect women’s rights by denying transgender Americans access to spaces that match their gender.

Middleton insisted that his bill would not deny anyone access to these public spaces, only require them to use spaces that match their sex assigned at birth — or “biological sex,” as Middleton’s bill defines it.

But Senator Judith Zaffirini, one of the longest-serving Democrats in the Texas Senate, pressed him hard on his assertions that this would not abridge the rights of transgender Texans.

“Regarding your definition of sex, senator, could defining sex as solely male and female conflict with federal anti-discrimination laws such as Title IX?” Zaffirini asked.

“No,” Middleton swiftly responded, arguing that his bill merely adopted definitions laid out in prior state legislation.

SB 7 would also block transgender women from accessing women-only domestic violence shelters, even though studies have found that transgender people face domestic violence nearly twice as often as their cisgender counterparts.

The bill would also force Texas prisons and correctional facilities to assign people based on their birth sex, something which transgender advocates have argued is cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Transgender people historically face higher rates of sexual assault and harassment, both from other prisoners and corrections officers, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality and a Georgetown Law Journal report.

And the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on behalf of three transgender people in federal prisons over an executive order forcing the movement of trans prisoners to other facilities and blocking their access to gender-affirming care. A federal judge temporarily prevented the Bureau of Prisons from enforcing the order in June and granted class action status to more than 2,000 transgender inmates of federal prisons.

SB 7 would also impose civil financial penalties on places that allow people to access spaces not matching their “biological sex,” with $5,000 for the first violation and $25,000 for each subsequent violation. And it would allow private citizens to report these violations to the attorney general’s office.

The bill now moves to the Texas House, where it will sit for an indeterminate time. Democratic members of the House left the state over the weekend to prevent the passage of controversial redistricting measures.