A Surge in Anti-Trans Legislation: 120 Bills Proposed for 2025
Lawmakers in 13 states have introduced at least 120 proposed laws seeking to roll back rights or legal protections for transgender people.
Lawmakers in more than a dozen states have introduced at least 120 bills explicitly targeting the transgender community or seeking to roll back rights or legal protections for trans individuals, according to transgender journalist Erin Reed.
Reed, who has been tracking anti-transgender legislation for her Erin in the Morning Substack, reported that the number of bills introduced before the start of 2025 state legislative sessions is 120 — a 50% increase from the 80 bills pre-filed before the start of the 2023 legislative calendar.
The bulk of the bills have been introduced in Texas and Missouri, but lawmakers in 11 other states have also embraced anti-transgender legislation as a priority for the upcoming year.
That list includes Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, Washington State, and Wyoming.
All those states, with the exceptions of Nevada and Washington, have Republican-controlled legislatures and passage of anti-transgender legislation is widely considered to be a fait accompli.
Republicans have championed anti-transgender causes in recent years — some because they hold arch-conservative social views, but many others because they see such legislation as a wedge issue that they can use to rally Republican base voters in election years.
In last year’s presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump successfully attacked Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over her past support for transgender rights. Moreover, right-wing groups allied with Trump ran ads accusing Harris of supporting transition-related surgeries for minors.
There seems to be no end in sight for transgender people who feel under attack from state legislators, as Trump has promised to roll back transgender rights and protections in his next term.
Bills that have been introduced this year in Texas, Missouri, South Carolina, and Wyoming include measures to strip transgender identity from law altogether by prohibiting individuals from amending the gender marker on their driver’s licenses or birth certificates to reflect their gender identity rather than their assigned sex at birth.
In other states, lawmakers have focused on prohibiting transgender individuals from entering restrooms that align with their gender identity.
As Reed reports, two bills in Texas would allow people to sue state agencies or local municipalities for failing to enforce the state’s “bathroom ban” if they believe that a transgender person has used facilities aligning with their gender identity.
A similar bill in Montana seeks to restrict transgender individuals to using only facilities that align with their assigned sex at birth. A bill in Missouri would classify allowing a transgender person to use bathrooms or locker rooms aligned with their gender identity in any “place of public accommodation” as “unlawful public discrimination.”
Republican lawmakers are also pushing for measures that make it easier to challenge and forcibly remove books with LGBTQ content from school and public library shelves, as well as in independent bookstores.
Texas appears to be the proving ground for this legislation, with lawmakers proposing limits on the types of defenses that librarians or booksellers can use if they are accused of making books with “obscene” content available to minors.
Other examples of bills being introduced include proposed sports bans, bans on drag in public venues, the imposition of policies to force schools to “out” transgender youth to their parents, and “Don’t Say Gay”-style laws prohibiting LGBTQ topics from being broached in classrooms.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, legislative attacks seeking to restrict or roll back freedoms or rights enjoyed by transgender individuals grew “exponentially” over the past two years.
In September, a groundbreaking study of 61,000 transgender and nonbinary individuals, published in Nature Human Behavior, claimed that anti-transgender legislation had directly led to a 72% increase in suicide attempts by transgender individuals compared to states without such legislation.
Later this year, the Supreme Court is expected to rule in a case dealing with whether states can prohibit transgender minors from accessing gender-affirming medical treatments. As noted by Reed, that case is expected to carry broader implications for other issues involving transgender rights. The high court may also determine whether anti-trans laws violate trans individuals’ right to equal protection under the law.
“This ruling has the potential to either shut the door on many of these bills and laws or swing it wide open, unleashing a flood of legislative attacks that could make 2025 a historically devastating year for transgender rights,” noted Reed.
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