Texas House to debate transgender sports bill in echo of ‘bathroom’ battles – Austin American-Statesman
For the first time since the failed “bathroom bills” roiled the Legislature in 2017, Texas lawmakers are closer than ever to passing a measure directed at the state’s transgender population.
House Bill 25, barring transgender students from participating in school sports based on their gender identity, will be debated Thursday on the House floor.
The scheduled vote is significant because the Texas House, led by Republicans with different priorities, has been the sand in the gears of GOP-led attempts to pass laws targeting transgender Texans. In addition to killing Senate-passed bills that would have banned transgender-friendly bathroom policies in 2017, the lower chamber earlier this year killed Senate measures to outlaw gender-affirming medical care, and then doomed other transgender sports bills by delaying action in the previous regular and special sessions.
Unless House Democrats can kill HB 25 with parliamentary challenges, passage is expected for a bill that has 75 Republican authors and co-authors, one vote short of a House majority.
If approved, HB 25 would next go to the Senate, which passed a similar measure Sept. 22.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Republican who presides over the Senate, has made the transgender sports bill a top priority during the regular session and all three special sessions. The Senate has shown the ability to act quickly on Patrick’s priorities, an important factor with the current special session ending Tuesday.
More:In fourth bid to pass transgender sports bill in Texas, GOP lawmakers hear fierce opposition
Ripple of anxiety
The prospect of HB 25’s passage sent a ripple of anxiety through the state’s LGBTQ community, advocates and families with transgender children.
“The only word to describe this move is cruel,” said Ricardo Martinez, head of Equality Texas, calling HB 25 part of “the Texas Legislature’s unrelenting assault on transgender children.”
Martinez accused Republican lawmakers of putting politics above people by targeting a vulnerable population for exclusion. Calls from transgender youth to a suicide-prevention hotline spiked during previous debates over bills targeting transgender Texans, advocates have said.
“Transgender children participating in sports is not a national emergency or a Texas emergency; these attacks on trans kids and the ongoing trauma to the trans community certainly are. This is unconscionable,” Martinez said. “Common sense policy doesn’t seek to harm Texans or ignore the negative implications of bills being proposed.”
Social and religious conservatives, disappointed that previous transgender sports bills died in the House, gathered outside the House chamber for a Wednesday morning news conference designed to pressure lawmakers to act on HB 25.
They got their wish when Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, the chairman of the House Calendars Committee, arrived to announce that his committee had minutes earlier scheduled HB 25 for a floor vote Thursday.
“It’s the only bill on the calendar, so the entire day is going to be focused on this,” Burrows said to loud applause.
Conservatives want to ban transgender athletes from girls sports. Their evidence is shaky.
‘This is about fairness’
Conservative leaders have been pushing since last year for a law requiring public school students to compete in sports under the “biological sex” listed on their birth certificate. They argue that it is a matter of safety and competitive fairness because biological males are generally faster, stronger and larger.
“Girls deserve to compete on a level playing field,” Mary Castle with Texas Values, a Christian advocacy group, said during the news conference.
“This is about fairness. It’s about women’s rights,” said Rep. Valoree Swanson, R-Spring, the author of HB 25. “It’s about going forward and not going backwards in rights for women.”
Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, has shepherded four bills through the Senate that would limit the participation of transgender athletes. He endorsed HB 25, saying it’s more than a matter of fairness — it’s a milestone in a much bigger fight.
“This was a stake in the ground on common sense, on other initiatives that are ongoing to unravel tradition, history and things that are important to us as a country and as a society and as a people,” Perry said during the news conference.
LGBTQ advocates say talk like that displays a dangerous animosity toward transgender Texans — amounting to state-sponsored bullying toward a group of people who already get bullied in schools and elsewhere.
HB 25, they say, is unnecessary because nobody could point to one Texas girl denied a chance to compete by a transgender athlete. Opponents also argue that the University Interscholastic League — which oversees public school athletics and competitions in Texas — already requires student athletes to compete under the sex listed on their birth certificate.
Bill supporters say they’ve seen an increase in the number of young Texans petitioning the courts to amend their birth certificates, which is why HB 25 specifies that athletes must produce a birth certificate issued at or near their time of birth. Bill opponents say the number of amended documents is much too small to justify a new state law codifying the practice.
Thursday’s vote will be the second scheduled for a transgender sports bill in the House.
The previous attempt, however, came near the end of the regular session in May, when the Calendars Committee scheduled the sports bill behind a long list of other measures, allowing Democratic delaying tactics to put a floor vote out of reach. When the midnight deadline for passage arrived with no vote taken, Democrats celebrated by waving small transgender pride flags and cheering.
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Bathroom bill memories
Joe Straus, a moderate Republican from San Antonio, was House speaker during the 2017 regular- and special-session fights over the bathroom bills — legislation he quietly opposed as unnecessary and potentially harmful to transgender Texans. Straus declined to refer any Senate-passed bathroom bill to a House committee, marking the legislation as dead on arrival and earning vocal denunciations from Patrick.
Straus, who declined to seek reelection, wrote an essay published by The Dallas Morning News in May that criticized legislative efforts to target transgender youths.
“We don’t have to understand what it means to be transgender in order to believe that these Texans deserve better than to be the topic of political debates about their right to exist,” Straus wrote.
House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, is in his first term leading the lower chamber. His approach to the transgender legislation is being closely watched by both sides of the issue, particularly since he told the Texas Tribune in 2019 that he opposed advancing legislation “bashing the gay community.”
The ultimate fate of HB 25 will become part of his legacy as speaker.
