How Texas' “bathroom bills” have evolved over a decade

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Safara Malone cherishes the public school environment she grew up in that accepted who she was as a young trans woman. The acceptance, the 20-year-old said, allowed her to flourish and focus on her education, giving her the support she needed to get to where she is now, as a Harvard University student.

That support was fragile, though. For half of her life, Texas lawmakers have made targeting the rights and public privileges of trans people in the state a legislative priority, she said. At the forefront of that push has been a so-far unsuccessful effort to restrict what bathrooms transgender people can use, something Malone said would have infringed on the little moments that made her high school experience so positive.

“I mean, just going to gym class or being able to get ready and do my makeup with my friends before school, those are all really important and cherished memories that are part of just being a young teen,” said Malone, who now serves as a policy intern for the Transgender Education Network of Texas.

With the second special session of 2025 underway, Gov. Greg Abbott has again placed bathroom restrictions based on sex assigned at birth on the legislative agenda. During the first special session, the Texas Legislature made another push toward passing a “bathroom bill” in the form of Senate Bill 7, which would ban trans people from using restrooms at schools or government buildings.

Now Senate Bill 8 in the second session, the bill and its lower chamber counterpart, House Bill 52, are the latest iterations of the roughly 16 bathroom bill proposals across more than 20 different bills and dozens of other anti-trans legislation filed in Texas since 2015. The two bills incorporate provisions from several of these previous versions and other bills to shift how transgender people would be treated in bathrooms, prisons and family violence shelters.

The bills follow a raft of other legislation state lawmakers have passed — banning trans athletes’ participation on certain sports teams, state definitions of sex and gender transition care bans — that all spurred from the initial fight to pass a bathroom ban.

“We protected girls’ sports, we protected women’s sports, we passed the bill to define male and female … and now the last piece of this equation is putting the penalties in the law,” Sen. Mayes Middleton said on the floor during the first 2025 special session as the upper chamber passed SB 7.

The first bathroom bills

Most legislators point to 2017 as the first instance of a bathroom bill being filed in the Texas Legislature, when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick included the bans among his legislative priorities, prompting an initiative that ultimately died in the House. And while Senate Bills 3 and 6 from 2017 are the basis of most current bathroom bills, the first series of proposals in the state were made in 2015, filed by two former House representatives.

Bathroom bills in Texas usually propose fining institutions when trans people use their restrooms, however most of the original slate of bills in 2015 proposed arrests, including one that would have made a violation a felony. The author of that bill, former state Rep. Debbie Riddle, said that trans people’s presence in public “wasn’t a topic of conversation” at the time. Still, the Tomball Republican’s concerns were largely the same as current supporters: that public accommodations for transgender people went against rationale and biblical truths.

“We are politically correcting ourselves out of common sense and ordinary decency for the everyday people that make our cities, and our state and even our nation a wonderful place to live,” Riddle said about maintained opposition to a bathroom bill. “No pun intended, we're flushing it down the toilet.”

Neither of Riddle’s two bathroom bills or two others filed by former Pasadena Republican Rep. Gilbert Peña in 2015 were heard. Of the four bills, only one from Peña proposed civil fines over criminal charges: House Bill 2801 would have allowed students who shared bathrooms with transgender students to sue their school.

HB 2801 also would have required that schools provide accommodations for students with gender identities separate from their sex assigned at birth and capped exemplary damages from the suits at $2,000. Yet, even without criminal penalties, HB 2801 was seen as a bridge too far. Then-chair of the House State Affairs committee Byron Cook told the Associated Press that HB 2801 needed to soften its language before it could be heard in committee. The bill was never revised and left unheard.

Although HB 2801 failed, its suggestion that schools could be sued for violations became the primary enforcement mechanism every future bathroom bill proposal adopted. Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, carried the two bathroom bills in 2017, and built on HB 2801 by creating a flat fine for violations in addition to any fees that could come from lawsuits. Those bills failed after receiving a firestorm of public opposition, as opponents called the bills discriminatory and pointed to a 2016 bathroom bill in North Carolina that caused economic backlash in the state.

“The pendulum swinging back”

After 2017’s tumultuous battle, conservative lawmakers took a step back from filing bathroom bills for six years, instead shifting their focus to other hot-button issues affecting trans people: sports and health care. After a brief period in 2019 in which no major anti-trans legislation was filed, dozens of bills in 2021 sought, and were ultimately successful, in barring trans youth athletes from competing on sports teams matching their identifying gender at the interscholastic level.

In supporting those restrictions, proponents found a new message: that keeping trans athletes out of women’s sports would protect female athletes from unfair competition.

Transgender people make up roughly 1% of the U.S. population and represent an even smaller share among athletes. Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said the new framing around protecting women was a reaction to growing acceptance of trans people in the United States, which he called “the most divisive idea” in the country.

“Conservatives and the Republicans are not the ones that started pushing these policies that led to problems with men and women's private spaces and sports, it was the left,” Schilling said. “The reason they say it's divisive is because they don't want to address it … And so, we're ending it, and we're going back to normalcy.”

In 2023, the state moved the ban up to the collegiate level, and banned medical gender transition care for minors. Those legislative victories for Republicans, combined with the newfound messaging aimed primarily at women and children, provided a groundwork proponents of the bathroom bill could later point to — and opportunities to expand their scope.

During the 2025 regular session, Senate Bill 240 was dubbed the “Texas Women’s Privacy Act,” and encompassed not just bathrooms in public schools and government agencies, but also aimed to restrict family violence shelters and prisons. Brian Klosterboer, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said the ground gained by conservatives focusing on trans youth has made support for bathroom bills and prison restrictions affecting trans adults easier.

“Unfortunately, those attacks have been quite effective,” Klosterboer said. “We're still in the early days of these new attempts to restrict the freedoms of trans adults, and I can see the pendulum swinging back.”

Growing support and concern

SB 8, which is also titled the Women’s Privacy Act, increases penalties for violations, changing the $1,000 first-time fine proposed in Kolkhorst’s 2017 bill to $5,000. Opponents of the bill said that these fines incentivize potentially overreaching enforcement like visual inspections of people entering bathrooms and could be abused.

“If someone like a [cisgender] man is mad at the City of Austin and is going into the women's restroom to cause a violation, there's no safeguards or guardrails on that civil right of action,” Klosterboer said. “So any person could sue the city, even though the city did nothing wrong.”

Those in favor of the fines, however, said that enforcement against an individual may deter people one-by-one, but that punishing agencies is a model that has already proven effective at the highest levels. One of President Donald Trump’s first actions as he entered his second term was to release an executive order defining male and female and denouncing “gender ideology.” Multiple states including Texas quickly followed with their own legal definitions.

Trump has also sued California for transgender athlete policies, and the Department of Justice has subpoenaed doctors who provide gender-affirming care for minors. Those efforts have created a chilling effect on trans care across the nation, opponents claim, but supporters have pointed to the Trump administration’s actions as a model for enforcement.

“This is the way that the Trump administration is enforcing this, by suing entire states,” Schilling said. “These are the ways that you actually get buy-in from the system that's been corrupted.”

The efforts from the White House is a stark shift from the Biden administration, which attempted to expand Title IX discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ students that conservative lawmakers saw as an unlawful overstep.

As the penalties and scope of subsequent bathroom bills have widened, so, too, has their support. Nineteen other states have passed some form of bathroom bill as Texas lawmakers have wrestled with their own, including two states that have created criminal penalties. Public sentiment has also shifted toward more restrictions, as 49% of Americans support legal requirements to use bathrooms that match someone’s gender assigned at birth, according to the Pew Research Center.

Despite public apprehension that allowing trans people in bathrooms creates dangerous situations for women, no statistical evidence is available to prove danger increases whenever trans people are able to use restrooms according to their gender identity. Allowing trans people to use bathrooms and other facilities matching their identifying gender does not cause an increase in assaults, according to a 2018 study from the Williams Institute.

Malone said growing animosity toward trans people is fueled because of legislation like bathroom bills, which portray the community as an imminent harm to people who likely don’t know a trans person. About 11% of people in the U.S. personally know someone who is transgender, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.

“They start to have a slight negative opinion because of simply, well, if all these states are outlawing these laws, there clearly has to be some rhyme or reason, and there really isn't,” Malone said. “The negative opinions and the negative legislation around it is sort of seeping into that movable middle, and that's what's really dangerous.”

House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, indicated in the closing days of the first special session that “protecting women’s spaces” would be a priority for the lower chamber during the second special session. A majority of the House’s representatives signed on as coauthors to the House versions of the proposal during the regular and first special session.

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