After a year of legislation that relentlessly targeted LGBTQ+ Americans, the community is already facing another potentially record-breaking legislative session in 2024. More than 500 bills were put forward in 2023 seeking to restrict rights and protections for queer and trans people, in arenas from public restroom access to gender-affirming health care, and LGBTQ+ advocates do not expect that historic pace to slow down with a presidential election on the horizon. If re-elected to the White House, former President Donald Trump has already floated a federal transition ban — pledging that, on day one, he will sign an “executive order instructing every federal agency to cease the promotion of sex or gender transition at any age.”
While no one can be certain what state legislatures are cooking up next year, experts say the political calendar has already started to take shape. Erin Reed, an independent journalist who covers anti-LGBTQ+ legislation across the country, says that observers are beginning to get an understanding of what 2024 holds from Republican bills pre-filed before the next wave of legislative sessions even starts. Missouri Republicans have pre-filed more than 20 bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights in advance of the 2024 legislative session, including legislation that would allow teachers to refuse using trans students’ pronouns and shield doctors sued for refusing to provide gender-affirming care. Lawmakers in New Hampshire and South Carolina have already begun filing their own bills; a pre-filed bill in South Carolina would make the state just the second to impose criminal penalties for trans people who use bathrooms that align with their gender.
Florida, for its part, got a jump on the 2024 session with a November 2023 bill, HB 599, seeking to expand the state’s existing “Don’t Say Gay” law to the workplace. If passed, it would ban any mandatory “training, instruction, or other activity on sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.” HB 599’s passage, according to Reed, would likely “have the effect of outlawing LGBTQ+ nonprofits” in Florida, and she believes the bill could be a bellwether for similar efforts across the country. “Many times we see what happens in Florida spiderweb throughout the nation,” she tells Them. “They generally tend to be the first ones to drop these kinds of things.”
“Biggest Bang for Their Buck”
Another indication of where the anti-LGBTQ+ movement is trending in 2024 is the ongoing budget fight in Congress, says Gillian Branstetter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). House lawmakers reportedly inserted at least 45 different anti-LGBTQ+ amendments into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) budget before they were squashed; these included provisions that prevent government buildings from flying Pride flags and effectively defund gender-affirming care at the federal level. The anti-LGBTQ+ proposals, if passed, would have also barred any public funds from going into gender-affirming care for trans people of any age,” says Branstetter, a communications strategist with the ACLU’s LGBT and Women’s Rights Project.
The NDAA amendments are a sign, says Branstetter, that Republicans will not stop now that 21 states have passed laws comprehensively banning gender-affirming care for trans youth. She believes that GOP lawmakers across the country are likely to follow the lead of states like Oklahoma and South Carolina, where lawmakers proposed legislation this year that would ban gender-affirming healthcare until the age of 26.
Other states have likewise begun restricting care to adults: In Missouri, Attorney General Andrew Bailey issued an “emergency rule” in April placing onerous and burdensome restrictions on trans health care for patients of all ages. And Florida’s own trans medical care ban, which was signed into law in May, has compromised providers’ abilities to provide gender-affirming care to any patient. It requires all gender-affirming care to be administered in person (with telehealth is no longer allowed) and by a physician only. That prohibits nurse practitioners, who provide the vast majority of trans health care in the state, from providing transition-related care
If Republicans are poised to expand trans health care restrictions in 2024, Branstetter says it’s part of a trend of GOP lawmakers attempting to get the “biggest bang for their buck.” She points to another bill likely to be imitated in 2024: Kansas’ so-called “Women’s Bill of Rights,” which rewrote the state’s definition of sex as defined solely by a person’s reproductive biology at birth. That move led the Kansas Department of Health to stop correcting trans people’s birth certificates and the state’s attorney general, Kris Kobach, to attempt to block gender marker updates on driver’s licenses.
“What I think they’re hoping for is that they get an easy headline that says: Kansas state legislator moves forward ‘Women's Bill of Rights,’” says Branstetter. “If you ask most people what’s in a ‘Women’s Bill of Rights,’ they might think it includes, say, protections for abortion, from discrimination at work, that it includes equal pay, paid leave, access to childcare, or safety from violence. These laws, of course, do nothing of the sort. They are being proposed and passed by the very same politicians who are banning abortion and limiting access to contraception.”
While groups like the ACLU are fighting to stop enforcement of Kansas’s law, potential lawsuits against anti-LGBTQ+ legislation are unlikely to stop copycats from being introduced. This year, at least six states passed restrictions on public performances of drag, and many of those efforts have been temporarily blocked or struck down entirely. But for the right, Reed says those losses “don’t necessarily have the deterrence effect that one might think.” As the Ohio Legislature recently debated its own drag ban, she says the sponsor claimed his legislation was “different” from those bills — even though it isn’t, she affirms
“I’ve read the bills,” Reed says. “They’re all virtually the same. If anything, the court victories against these laws make [politicians] more likely to pass them. They know that they can pass, and if a court overturns them, then that’s no skin off their back. If they win in a court case, then the drag bans get to go into power.”
Doubling Down
In all, experts believe that right-wing lawmakers are going to spend 2024 doubling down on the same kinds of attacks that they pushed in previous years, everything from more LGBTQ+ curricular bans to additional restrictions on youth playing sports. A handful of GOP-led states, including Georgia and Nebraska, have yet to limit trans sports participation, and just eight states currently have “Don’t Say Gay” laws in place. According to data from the ACLU, at least 233 bills were put forward in 2023 targeting education in schools, and some of those proposals are likely to be revisited next year.
As Republican lawmakers continue to press forward with legislation singling out LGBTQ+ people for harm, many worry the most vulnerable members of the community will be most affected. Observers are concerned that, in 2024, the GOP will shift its focus to targeting trans people who are forced to travel to affirming states to have their medical needs met. With the rise in restrictions on trans health treatments, at least 14 states (and Washington, D.C.) have enacted laws or executive orders preventing prosecutions against patients who cross the border for gender-affirming care. To stop states from providing that care, Idaho has pushed a bill two years running that would charge parents and guardians with a felony if they leave the state to seek transition treatment for a minor.
But Heron Greenesmith, deputy director for the Transgender Law Center, says the reality is that some people will have the ability to circumvent the laws: those with access and privilege. The individuals harmed, they argue, will be “those among us who can't take extraordinary steps to seek gender-affirming care.” “Banning interstate travel means that people who can afford the fines or can afford an attorney can access interstate travel, and the people who can’t afford fines and attorneys will not,” Greenesmith tells Them. “That includes low-income trans people, which disproportionately includes Black, Indigenous, and other trans folks of color, and trans people with disabilities.”
But despite the continued fights that lay ahead, experts remain largely optimistic about the future of LGBTQ+ equality. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), at least 56% of this year’s record number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills were defeated and failed to become law. Only 14% passed, while the remainder will carry over into 2024. Of the 19 trans youth healthcare bans passed in 2023, nearly all are currently being challenged in court.
“It’s important to remember that this backlash we are seeing is a sign of our power,” says Ash Orr, the press relations manager for NCTE. “An example I like to use is: First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. We have made it through the they ignore you stage, and even the they laugh at you stage. We are now in the they fight you stage, so we are in a historic moment. I do believe that we are the generation that can get this done, more so than any other generation before or after us.”
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