How Anti-Trans Forces Turned an Amendment Into a Platform
An Ohio senate bill for access to college credits gets a transgender bathroom ban stapled to it last minute.
by Mira Lazine
The rush by Ohio lawmakers last week to pass a sweeping transgender bathroom ban for public and private schools, from kindergarten through college, pulls back the curtain on some of the anti-trans tactics and groups that will be at work in legislatures across the country in the coming months.
Acting in a lame-duck session, the Ohio state Senate pushed through the nation’s first anti-trans bill of the post-2024 election era. The bill, which awaits Gov. Mike DeWine’s signature, would be one of the most extensive anti-trans bathroom bans in the nation because it reaches beyond grades K-12 into higher education and applies to private institutions as well as public ones. Even gender-neutral bathrooms would be banned in certain settings.
The twisting history of the Ohio ban offers some insight into anti-trans political players and their maneuvering. The ban first emerged in the Ohio House of Representatives more than a year ago. Sponsored by Republicans Beth Lear and Adam Bird, the original version borrowed heavily from some of the most extreme legislative language put forward in other states. That measure, House Bill 183, finally passed the House but sat dormant for months.
Until last week. That’s when it got shoved into an entirely different piece of legislation, on an entirely unrelated topic: Senate Bill 104, which was aimed at providing college credits for high school students.
It was an “amendment” with an agenda all its own.
“It's unconscionable to me that we would put this kind of an amendment on a bill that originally was to expand access for students to college credits and turn it into just a bill of bigotry and hate and fear mongering,” the Senate Democratic Leader Nickie Antonio told Assigned Media.
The evolution got plenty of external help. The Ohio Capital Journal reported earlier this year that the president of the trans-exclusionary feminist group Women’s Liberation Front, Sharon Bryne, had played a significant role in guiding the ban from its inception in the House last year. In emails cited by The Journal, she gave strategic advice to Lear on how to advance the ban at crucial junctures.
The Center for Christian Virtue, an advocacy group that opposes gay marriage, abortion rights and non-binary rights, is another major player in anti-trans efforts in Ohio and elsewhere.
A day before House Bill 183 was merged into Senate Bill 104, the Center for Christian Virtue said on its website that it was devoting substantial lobbying resources into getting a bathroom ban passed in the lame-duck session.
How close is the group to the House sponsors of the ban? The Center for Christian Virtue’s president, Adam Baer, boasted that the lawmakers watched last week’s Senate hearing alongside his communications director, David Mahan, and other Christian Virtue staff.
“A ton of credit to Rep. Lear and Rep. Adam Bird, they were the original bill’s sponsors. They were there with David and the whole team yesterday as this bill got voted on,” Baer said on the organization’s podcast.
The group has ties to other right-wing organizations. According to Mapping Project 2025, which charts organizations linked to Project 2025, the Center for Christian Virtue was at one time a partner in the Forge Leadership Network, a right-wing training organization allied with the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation. While the center’s name was quietly taken off the partner list after Mapping revealed the connection, staff and board member pages show that the groups share many members.
“They advocate heavily for bigoted bills such as these that definitely target marginalized people, especially transgender people within the LGBTQ community,” Antonio, the Democratic leader, said of the Center for Christian Virtue. “It's almost like it's their top priority to attack transgender people in the state of Ohio at every turn.”
Much of the Center for Christian Virtue’s advocacy adopts the language of Project 2025 to leverage its local connections in state government. The center, like other anti-trans advocates, has consistently pushed a “safety” message – one that defies research.
No peer reviewed research has ever shown an increased risk of sexual harassment of cisgender individuals due to allowing transgender people the use of the restroom of their choice. A Williams Institute study from 2018 showed not only no relationship between state-level laws regulating transgender care and bathroom misconduct, it also found that misconduct was exceedingly rare and largely confined to cisgender individuals.
In fact, research has shown an opposite “safety” effect: A 2019 study in the journal Pediatrics found that transgender individuals are at greater risk of being sexually assaulted by cisgender individuals in areas with restrictive bathroom laws.
Jocelyn Rosnick, policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, said that her group was considering legal action.
“If allowed to go into effect, SB 104 will create unsafe environments for trans and gender non-confirming individuals of all ages,” she said in a statement. “This bill ignores the material reality that transgender people endure higher rates of sexual violence and assaults, particularly while using public restrooms, than people who are not transgender.”
Antonio said a number of backers of the original college credits legislation felt compelled to withdraw their support after the bill became something quite different.
For her part, Antonio said she hoped the measure would go straight to court. She suggested, for instance, that the bill, the final version of which was a hodgepodge covering dissimilar topics, could be challenged successfully under the “single subject” law in Ohio.
“It defies the single subject law that the state of Ohio has: It says that when we pass a piece of legislation, it's supposed to be on a single subject,” Antonio said.
A ban that targets college students opens another avenue for legal challenge, she said. “We know that this bill goes into the garden all the way up through higher ed. It addresses both public and private schools, which is the other reason why I think there'll be litigation.”
However the ban is fought in court, though, its impact could be long lasting. DeWine’s office did not respond to a request for comment on his plans, though even a veto is likely to be overridden.
Mira Lazine is a freelance journalist covering transgender issues, politics, and science. She can be found on Twitter, Mastodon, and BlueSky, @MiraLazine