Trans Texans brace for life under strict sex definition law

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

---

It was in a San Antonio courtroom in 2015 that Leo Tyler felt he became who he was always meant to be.

The 17-year-old had long known he was trans, but it didn’t feel real until a judge agreed to change the name and gender on his government documents.

“It was euphoric,” Tyler, now 27, recalls. “Walking out of that courtroom, I felt so seen.”

Tyler was the youngest in a group of people changing their gender markers that day. On the steps of the courthouse, they all embraced him, crying tears of joy over the idea that he’d get to live his whole adult life on his own terms.

“‘This is something no one can ever take away from me,’” he remembers thinking.

But now, just a decade later, Tyler finds himself in limbo, waiting to see whether the state of Texas will require him and other trans people to live as the sex they were assigned at birth, rather than the gender they identify as.

House Bill 229, which the governor is expected to sign into law, enforces a definition of sex based on the reproductive system someone was born with — women produce ova, men fertilize them. This definition could now be applied across state statute, leaving trans people and lawyers rushing to understand what exactly will change as a result of this law.

“The question of the hour is how will [HB] 229 be enforced and applied,” said Sarah Corning, a legal fellow at the ACLU of Texas. “What we do know is that it’s incredibly disrespectful to so many Texans the Legislature represents, and completely disregards their identity.”

Compared to past legislative sessions, where battles over bathrooms, drag shows and gender-affirming care sparked dramatic showdowns between lawmakers and community members, the 2025 session was remarkably quiet.

But HB 229 and the handful of other bills that passed may end up having even more significant consequences for LGBTQ people than many people realize, Corning said. The ripple effect will likely take years to sort out.

Tyler, who works at a shelter for LGBTQ youth and runs support groups for trans people, is struggling to provide his community with answers he himself doesn’t have.

Carrying a driver’s license that says he’s a woman would “be like I’m carrying an ID of some random person,” Tyler said. “That name, that photo, that doesn’t reflect who I am. I could just see it causing a lot of confusion, and for what?”

Rise of anti-trans policies

LGBTQ advocates went into this legislative session unsure of what to expect.

It had been a bruising few years, with Texas lawmakers pushing more, and more aggressive bills than any other state. In 2023, they banned trans athletes from playing college sports, as they’d done for K-12, prohibited children at drag shows and banned certain gender-affirming medical care for minors. Protesters turned out in full force, leading to arrests in the House chamber.

The issue only became more prominent during the 2024 presidential election, where Republicans spent more than $200 million on round-the-clock anti-trans ads hammering Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democratic candidates.

Immediately after entering office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order asserting there are only two sexes, male and female. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott followed with a similar order for Texas, and the Texas Department of Public Safety began refusing to change gender markers on drivers’ licenses, even with court orders.

Amid all this upheaval, it wasn’t immediately clear what Texas legislators’ next priorities would be on this front, Johnathan Gooch, communications director at Equality Texas, said in April.

“Having had such an aggressively anti-trans legislative session in 2023, they accomplished a lot of things they wanted to do, and now the federal government is doing a lot of what they’d hoped,” he said. “That’s left Texas [lawmakers] to dig into some of the finer details, which are less obvious to most people.”

The bills that gained traction this session were more nuanced and harder to understand, which Brad Pritchett, CEO of Equality Texas, said was intentional.

“This year, they have tried to hide the discrimination in bills that are more and more complicated,” he said at a rally, adding that legislators were hoping people’s “eyes glaze over” as they chipped away at health insurance and discrimination protections for trans people.

One new law will require health insurers that cover gender-affirming care to also cover all costs related to detransitioning or any adverse effects. Or, as bill sponsor Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Allen, summarized it, “if you take somebody to the dance and they want to go home, then you have to take them home.”

Democrats argued that this would disincentivize health insurers from covering gender-affirming care by significantly raising the costs, and filed more than half a dozen amendments to narrow the scope of the bill, to no avail. A related bill that passed will require medical records to list someone’s birth sex, even if they’ve transitioned, which advocates worry will lead to discrimination.

“However you couch it, [this legislation] is about eliminating the existence of trans individuals in Texas,” Rep. Ann Johnson, a Democrat from Houston, said during the debate. “Stop pretending that you're for freedom. Stop pretending that this is about the kids."

The most high-impact bill, though, was HB 229, the “sex definition” bill. The preface to the bill said this strict sex definition would be applied across bathrooms, prisons, shelters and sports teams, although legal experts say it is likely contained to anywhere sex is already explicitly mentioned in statute. Supporters call it the “Women’s Bill of Rights,” and said it was necessary to protect women-only spaces from the intrusion of men.

“If we can no longer define what a woman is, we cannot defend what women have won,” Rep. Ellen Troxclair, an Austin Republican, said on the floor. “We cannot protect what we cannot define.”

But for trans people, this strict definition leaves them in purgatory, unsure what exactly will change and where exactly they belong.

Fight to preserve trans identity

Ian Pittman, an attorney who has helped dozens of trans people change their gender markers, said it’s hard to imagine the state combing back through every individual drivers’ license and birth certificate to find ones where the gender marker was changed.

He anticipates this might come up when people renew their licenses, but it would depend on each individual case. He’s more worried about the “butterfly effect” of how this definition will come to be used across state and local laws, whether or not HB 229 actually applies to that particular statute.

While many trans people celebrated the fact that a “bathroom bill,” which requires people to use the bathroom that aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth, didn’t pass this session, Pittman said the sex definition law could potentially end up having the same impact on the ground.

“There may not be a bathroom ban, but someone might say, since we have ‘woman’ defined in the government code, this courthouse bathroom is now only for people who are women by the government code definition,” he said. “It’s going to be used as a sword, not a shield.”

For trans people like Tyler, who are living fully as the gender they identify with, carrying documents that say they’re a different sex would require outing themselves anytime they fly, apply for a job, try to get a loan, are pulled over, or go to a bar, he said.

“I feel like, this is me, and I just want to have a job, and put food on the table, and pay bills, and it’s very upsetting that they just threw this bill … down and now it could impact all of that,” he said. “I’ve had to take time away just to cry because it gets very depleting.”

Ryan McBride has been on testosterone and living as a man for two years. But he hadn’t yet changed his gender marker, in part due to fear that he would face discrimination at the doctor’s office. Now, he worries that he missed the window.

He watched the Legislature closely this session, refreshing its website multiple times a day to see what bills were passing, and what they might mean for him and his community. When lawmakers gaveled out on June 1, he breathed a sigh of relief, taking a moment to celebrate that they didn’t go further than they did.

“Weird start to Pride Month,” he said wryly.

But even before any bills have gone into effect, living as a trans person in Texas has already become harder, he said. He’s faced an uptick in unwanted attention, which he attributes to everyday people who previously had no awareness of, let alone opinion on, trans people suddenly becoming hyper-aware of any gender diversity.

“I’ve been ma’am-ed a lot more, and I was worried I’m not passing as well anymore, but I’ve heard this from other trans people that they’re getting it too,” he said. “No one is neutral anymore, it seems like, everyone is either really supportive or really opposed,”

This is part of the long-term goal of all the bills that passed this session, Pittman said. Even if they don’t change everything overnight, it’s part of a campaign to make Texas inhospitable to trans people, to make them move, or live as the sex they were assigned at birth.

“It’s more about creating confusion and it’s meant to foment a divisive atmosphere and just make people wonder, do I really want to live in Texas as a trans person, where everything is becoming so hostile?” he said.

Disclosure: Equality Texas has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

---

Big news: 20 more speakers join the TribFest lineup! New additions include Margaret Spellings, former U.S. secretary of education and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center; Michael Curry, former presiding bishop and primate of The Episcopal Church; Beto O’Rourke, former U.S. Representative, D-El Paso; Joe Lonsdale, entrepreneur, founder and managing partner at 8VC; and Katie Phang, journalist and trial lawyer.

Get tickets.

TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.