Republican lawmakers move anti-LGBTQ measures in five states

Already in 2024, anti-LGBTQ measures have passed at least one chamber in Arizona, Idaho, South Carolina, Utah, and West Virginia — including two new Utah laws.

In the first six weeks of 2024, at least one chamber of five states’ legislatures passed anti-LGBTQ legislation — with two such bills already being signed into law.

The two new laws were both signed by Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. The five other bills that passed one chamber are in Arizona, Idaho, South Carolina, Utah, and West Virginia, per the ACLU’s legislative tracker. All of the legislative chambers in question are controlled by Republicans.

Additionally, Ohio’s 2023 bill banning gender-affirming care for minors and including a sports ban (H.B. 68) became law in 2024 over the December 2023 veto of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine by legislative override.¹

[Read this explainer for more information on how I approach coverage of anti-LGBTQ legislation at Law Dork.]

In addition to the Utah anti-trans facilities law previously covered at Law Dork, the other new Utah law (H.B. 261) is part of the so-called “anti-DEI” laws limiting or banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in education, government more broadly, or even — in the case of Florida — private business.

Although the law is much more extensive and the discussion focused on race — and Cox has received criticism on that front for signing it — the law itself creates several limits on how public entities, including schools, can make policies relating to “personal identity characteristics,” which include both sexual orientation and gender identity, in addition to race:

The Arizona bill (S.B. 1005), which has passed the state’s Senate, is a blunt-force (but not necessarily well-thought-out) version of such legislation. Under the Arizona measure, as it passed the Senate, a public entity would not be allowed to:

Legally, no public entity could promote a theory of allyship. Legally, no public entity could promote a theory of heteronormativity. (If this ever became law, someone would quickly realize lawmakers screwed up here with their “let’s throw all these words we don’t like into the bucket” approach.) Legally, no public entity could promote a theory of gender identity, whatever that means. Legally, no public entity could promote “any related theory.”

Few things show how ironically short-sighted the bill is than the fact that these Arizona lawmakers want to ban promotion of any theory of microaggressions by public entities — which is a statement in and of itself. The bill was sent to the House on February 1 after passage by the Senate.

Arizona, however, does have a Democratic governor — Gov. Katie Hobbs — and the bill only passed the Senate 16-13 (with a similarly closely divided House), so, assuming Hobbs opposes it, it is unlikely to become law.

In South Carolina, however, a sort of omnibus anti-transgender bill that passed the House in January (H. 6424) is much more troubling and much more likely to become law.

The legislation contains a ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors, as well as a ban on Medicaid funding for gender-affirming medical care to people until they turn 26 and a ban on public funding for gender-affirming medical care. It also includes a provision defining “sex” and, finally, a forced outing bill for trans students.

I do find it shocking and disturbing how broad these forced outing provisions have gotten over the past year — and want to share how specific this one is:

The Idaho legislation (H.B. 421), which passed the House on Feb. 7, is a bill to define “sex” to exclude transgender and non-binary people. It goes further than past bills, so I want to lay it out a bit.

“In human beings, there are two, and only two, sexes: male and female,” the bill text declares. The backers of the bill — and the House — want to define sex and gender for all purposes, at all ages, as relating to eggs and sperm. That’s literally it:

Lest you doubt their purpose, these lawmakers wanted to make their anti-trans purpose abundantly clear:

So, Idaho lawmakers want to define a word as not being concepts that are so well understood that they can use those words in un-defining them as being gender without needing to define them.

Well done, folks.

Utah’s House, meanwhile, has passed a bill (H.B. 316) that would, by default, ban transgender people from being placed in a jail or prison facility that matches their gender identity. A transgender person could only be placed in a facility that matches their gender after an extensive and invasive individualized assessment.

Finally, in West Virginia, lawmakers are addressing the urgent issue of preventing people from having their gender listed as non-binary on their birth certificate with a bill (H.B. 4233) that passed the House on February 9.

1. This paragraph was added after initial publication.