Editor’s Note: Joelle DiPaolo initially published the following article in the Texas Observer on February 11, 2025. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet and magazine. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and X.”
With another legislative session that could pile on even more anti-trans policies, LBGTQ+ groups grapple with how to protect their communities.
When Emmett Schelling first moved to Texas, it wasn’t to become an advocate. It was for a corporate job.
He began volunteering with the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT) at a time when a so-called “bathroom bill,” which would have mandated people use the bathroom of their biological sex, was still just an idea.
When the bathroom bill became a fully formed piece of legislation that consumed the 2017 session, its existence made Schelling acutely aware of who he was as a transgender man. It also put him on notice that the Legislature could—and would—try to legislate who he could be. The bathroom bill did not pass that year. But since then, the number of anti-LGBTQ bills filed by state legislators increased from two dozen in 2017 to over 100 in 2023.
As the 2025 legislative session ramps up, advocates warn that Republican lawmakers are poised to renew their assault against transgender Texans with dozens of new bills aimed at wiping away their existence.
“Trans people are fighting for our lives,” said Schelling, who is now the executive director of TENT. “We are fighting for the literal freedom to exist, and we are fighting for people to recognize the same sanctity of our lives as they do when they’re looking at any human being.”
Last session, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 15, which expanded the 2021 ban on trans girls participating on women’s teams in K-12 sports to include higher education. The Legislature also passed Senate Bill 14, which banned minors from receiving gender-affirming care like puberty blockers, making Texas the largest state to enact such a law. The GOP-controlled Lege also passed a bill outlawing public drag shows, though a federal judge declared the law to be unconstitutional.
Trans advocates expect a similar onslaught this session.
Indeed, in his State of the State address earlier this month, Governor Greg Abbott continued to press the issue. “No boys in girls’ sports. The State of Texas recognizes only two genders – male and female,” Abbott said. “Any educator who tells students that boys can be girls should be fired on the spot.”
So far, 52 anti-trans bills have been filed, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker.
Republican legislators have filed numerous bills targeting trans kids in schools, such as House Bill 1655, which would prohibit public school employees from helping a child “socially transition” by using their correct name and pronouns. The bill calls for a school to lose funding for any violation. House Bill 344 would prohibit instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in K-12 schools. House Bill 1123 would require students to compete in interscholastic athletic competitions on the basis of their biological sex.
Legislators have also continued their crusade to limit access to or altogether outlaw transgender healthcare. That includes measures like House Bill 847 that would prohibit using taxpayer money for gender-affirming care such as hormone replacement therapy or surgery. There’s also legislation like Senator Bob Hall’s Senate Bill 115 that advocates warn is meant to make the financial costs of providing gender-affirming care prohibitive for doctors and health insurers. (A version of Hall’s bill passed the Senate last session.)
Republicans are also pushing measures, like House Bill 477, to require a person’s biological sex to be included on their birth certificate, and legislation defining male and female, based on reproductive organs, as the only two genders. Representative Steve Toth, a right-wing Republican from The Woodlands first revived the 2017 bathroom bill last session (though it never got a hearing) and has filed it again this year.
Even as they’re being inundated with new anti-trans bills at the state level and a flood of anti-LGBTQ+ policies from the new Trump administration, advocates in Texas are playing a mix of offense and defense. Last legislative session, TENT worked with community and partner organizations to file over 100 proactive bills that would improve the well-being of all Texans, Schelling said. One such bill was Senate Bill 110, which would have prohibited discrimination in places of public accommodation. Though none gained legislative traction, the organizations have once again enlisted allied lawmakers to file a number of bills on their agenda for this session, Schelling said.
“[These bills] focus in on community, focus in on economic issues, focus in on the things that day in, day out affect [people’s] lives, including trans people,” Schelling said. “These policies are for everyone, to try to benefit everyone, to try to benefit the state.”
Advocates are also working to mitigate the effects of harmful laws passed during the last session and to proactively help trans Texans with education campaigns, legal resources, and community support.
Hotline calls to organizations like the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization aimed at preventing suicide in LGBTQ+ youth, increased by 700 percent after the election of President Trump because of the promise of anti-trans politics to follow. Anti-trans laws led to a 72 percent increase in suicide attempts in trans and nonbinary youth, a 2024 study by Trevor Project researchers found.
Groups like the Trans Legal Aid Clinic of Texas are focused on providing legal guidance to trans people regarding new state and federal laws. The legal clinic has provided trans Texans a “roadmap” for how to change gender markers and names on their government documents like driver’s licenses and passports. Board Chair Pete Makopoulos-Senftleber joined the clinic in 2019 to help other trans people navigate this tricky bureaucracy.
This summer, the Department of Public Safety and Department of State Health Services blocked trans people from updating gender markers on their driver’s licenses and birth certificates respectively. Because of these directives, the clinic had to “throw the roadmap out the window,” Makopoulos-Senftleber said. Last fall, the clinic created a fund to help trans and nonbinary Texans obtain a passport—and partnered with the Montrose Center, a hub for the LGBTQ+ community in Houston, to cover the cost of 500 passports.
Though the clinic’s mission hasn’t changed, it’s been more of a struggle to help people understand what documents they can update. “[We’re] constantly having to keep our fingers on the pulse of this patchwork of horrible legislative patterns and policy directives,” Makopoulos-Senftleber said. “The fear and panic cause people to spiral.”
On January 20, President Trump signed an executive order declaring federal government documents should allow only two genders, male and female, based on biological sex. This would include passports, which began offering an “X” gender option in 2022.
The full extent of the executive order’s impact remains unclear, but rhetoric alone can contribute to fear and confusion, said Paul Castillo, deputy legal director for Lambda Legal.
“This is the exact sort of playbook that the Governor, the Attorney General, and the Legislature have used for their political purposes and to impact the lives of trans and nonbinary folks,” Castillo said. “They understand that simply making a statement does have impacts on the health and wellbeing of trans folks.”
Attacks on every level, Makopoulos-Senftleber said, make it increasingly difficult to provide critical support to the trans community.
“[We need to] understand the vast complexity of challenges that trans individuals and trans organizations are having to confront,” Makopoulos-Senftleber said. “[It’s the] political and social climate across the country as a whole that’s making our work harder, and the struggle of trans, nonbinary individuals that much harder every day.”
Avery Belyeu, head of the Montrose Center, which offers counseling services and support groups, said it’s vitally important for trans people to take care of themselves and seek support.
“I expect our community to be experiencing fear and anxiety,” Belyeu said. “We’re the side of the LGBTQ+ nonprofit world that’s focused on joy, that’s focused on care, that’s focused on resilience.” As a trans woman, Belyeu said she takes special pride in having resources that specifically support the trans community.
Lex Loro, interim executive director of The Pride Center San Antonio, said she hopes trans people in the San Antonio area know there’s places they can go for support. “Seeing these headlines and hearing this news is really scary, and it can be even scarier if you do not feel connected to community and if you feel isolated,” Loro said. “That is why we really, really want to let people know that the Pride Center exists.”
Loro said members of the Pride Center will be involved in advocacy work, such as showing up at the Capitol for TENT’s advocacy day in March. But they also stressed the importance of community bonding, especially in San Antonio, which doesn’t have the resources of a city with a more developed queer community like Houston.
“We’re not going anywhere, and we’re going to continue to find solutions to support queer people,” Loro said.
Schelling, the director of TENT, said he encourages people to connect with trans-led organizations on both the local and state level as each has its own role in the advocacy space.
“A lot of it is just understanding the sphere of influence that each of us has in our own way,” Schelling said. “There’s so much movement, there’s so many attacks on every level, and so that’s where I really lean in and say, ‘What organizing is happening by the trans people in your community?’”
Supporting trans-led organizations that are leading this work is key, Schelling said.
“We have voices, we have thoughts,” Schelling said. “We should be the ones who are actually talking about what these issues are and how they’re directly impacting us. We don’t need hand-holders or spokespeople to get in the way of that.”
Though the Legislature, and the political climate as a whole, is hostile towards trans people right now, Schelling said he believes things will get better eventually. Until then, he’ll continue to fight.
“We will continue to claim the freedom and the liberty of being authentically who we are in this world,” Schelling said. “It’s just important to remind communities that we have indeed been in worse places in time, and we have survived that, and we have continued to exist, and we will still continue to exist through the attacks coming from the State of Texas.”
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