Broad Trans Bathroom Ban Passes Texas Senate in Special Session

“The only way anyone is going to realistically try to enforce this is by looking at a person and deciding they don’t look quite ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ enough.”

Public Record

Ash Hall, a policy strategist at the Texas ACLU, looked tired as they testified yet again in front of the Texas State Senate, this time on the afternoon of August 15.

“Obviously, I’ve already talked to y’all about this before,” they said. The bill on the docket—a so-called “trans bathroom ban” for publicly funded institutions, including everything from schools to airports—encourages cruelty, frivolous lawsuits, and “gender policing,” Hall argued.

Earlier this month, Hall was among a hundred Texans (at least) to voice opposition to the bill during the first 2025 special legislative session. At 10 a.m. on Friday, that session adjourned.

Twenty minutes later, Governor Greg Abbott announced a new one, scheduled for noon the same day. And once again, the bathroom bill, which anti-trans politicians have labelled the “Texas Women’s Privacy Act,” is back on the table. Versions of it have been proposed in Texas for nearly a decade.

“The Senators filed bills, the bills got referred to committees, and then the Senate State Affairs Committee held a hearing on the bathroom ban (now under the new bill number SB 8)—all within a single day,” said a state-based civil rights group, Equality Texas, in an email blast. “This is not normal [...] The rules state they must give the public 24 hours’ notice before a hearing. However, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick suspended the rules so committee hearings could begin immediately.”

SB 8 passed in the state senate on Tuesday, August 19. House Bills 52 and 214, its companion bills in the legislature, have been filed and await a formal vote now that the state house of representatives has, for the first time in weeks, achieved the quorum of lawmakers required to pass any bills.

That’s what sparked this second special session, which kicked off as Democratic representatives returned en masse to Austin from out of state. Dozens of them had fled to other jurisdictions in an attempt to break quorum and circumvent the last special session. The weeks-long stand-off was triggered by a controversial gerrymandering plan being pushed by the GOP.

Democrats successfully ran out the clock, but it wasn’t enough to stop the redistricting bill nor the anti-trans bill in its tracks. Amidst mounting fines and threat of law enforcement action, the lawmakers came home.

In the meantime, conservatives have continued to hyperfixate on where trans people pee. Texas would be the seventh state to adopt such a law, if it passes. But enforcement mechanisms remain vague; it empowers individual Texans to interrogate another person’s sex or gender on the spot. The attorney general or even private citizens would be allowed to sue institutions they accuse of permitting a presumed-trans person into certain sexed spaces—including government-owned sports arenas, libraries, airports, and parks.

“It is not going to matter if someone is trans, intersex or cisgender,” Hall told lawmakers. “The only way anyone is going to realistically try to enforce this is by looking at a person and deciding they don’t look quite ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ enough.”

Special sessions are usually invoked by governors for emergency, priority bills. The first session was called in June, but in July, deadly flooding in the region wiped out a girls’ summer camp and caused the governor to add disaster preparedness and relief to the agenda. By tying voter suppression and anti-trans policies to the flood relief bills, the Texas GOP seemingly made a strategic move: They used dead kids in Texas as human shields for their assaults on civil rights.

“Any aid to their constituents who have been harmed by these floods is being delayed and denied by the derelict democrats,” Abbott told the press. It’s a convenient rhetorical cudgel until you remember that, for years, Texas Republicans have blocked the very precautionary measures that could have stopped the deadly tragedy in the first place.

Meanwhile, the manufactured moral panic around trans people has already resulted in young girls, both cis and trans, being doxxed, threatened, or functionally coerced to expose their breasts in order to stave off anti-trans zealots. This happened to a high school student in Minnesota, for example, who was harassed by a waiter in a Buffalo Wild Wings bathroom. A similar story transpired in Arizona, where a teenager was accosted by male police officers inside a Walmart women’s room. In both of these cases, the victims were cisgender women.