Bathroom Ban Resurgence: 20 Bills in 12 States Attempt to Force Trans People Into the Wrong Bathrooms

Last year, Republicans across the country passed bans on transgender participation in sports and bans on gender-affirming care for youth. In 2024, a resurgence of bathroom bans is testing how far the GOP’s targeting of the trans community can go.

by Evan Urquhart

When you use the bathroom, how often are you expected to provide your birth certificate? If you said never, that’s because the ordinary way people have always used public restrooms is by self-sorting: You know you’re a man, so you voluntarily use the bathroom featuring a stick figure without a dress. You know you’re a woman, so you use the women’s room. This common sense self-sorting has been threatened by, well, nothing really except the fact that a few years ago conservatives realized trans people exist (and they don’t like it one bit).

According to the LGBTQ+ Legislative Tracker 2024 (a publicly available spreadsheet created and maintained by a team of volunteers headed by journalist Erin Reed that includes this reporter), at least 20 different bills seeking to restrict members of the trans community to bathrooms according to their birth-assigned sex have been introduced in 12 different states in just the first month of 2024.

The introduced bills vary greatly in both their scope and likelihood of passing. For example, a single state senator in Arizona, John Kavanagh, introduced two separate bills to ban public schools from allowing trans students to use bathrooms and locker rooms with other students of their gender. It is nearly identical to a bill sponsored by Kavanagh last year, which was vetoed by Democratic governor Katie Hobbes. The bill is both limited in scope and unlikely to pass.

On the extreme other end, with a wide ranging ban posing a very high risk of becoming law, is Utah, where the House of Representatives already acted to pass a criminal ban on trans people of any age using the bathroom in state facilities. This category would include all airports, convention centers, courts, public schools and universities in the state, as well as the legislature itself. The ban is scheduled for a vote in state Senate today and believed likely to pass. Utah’s ban empowers members of the public to call the police on trans people whom they observe using a public bathroom. While it includes an exception for trans people who have had genital surgery and changed their birth certificates, neither of these would be visible to someone considering whether to call the police. The reliance of this bill on members of the public using visual cues to determine which bathroom a person ought to use carries a high risk that people with an androgynous or gender-nonconforming appearance, whether trans or not, will be arrested regardless of which bathroom they choose.

Additional bathroom bans of various types have been introduced in Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee.

It is unclear whether the constitution protects trans people from being excluded from public accommodations like restrooms in this way. Recently, the US Supreme Court chose not to hear a case involving an Indiana ban that bars trans youth from using bathrooms according to their gender identity at school, allowing a lower court ruling that overturned the law to stand. This means that currently, in Indiana, trans youth must be allowed to use bathrooms alongside other members of their gender, rather than being forced to use the bathroom of their birth-assigned sex. In other states, courts have allowed such bans to stand, creating a patchwork of conflicting lower court rulings that the Supreme Court has, thus far, chosen not to resolve.

Whatever the ultimate resolution in the courts, what’s clear is that Republicans have shown an increased appetite to institute bans on trans people using public restrooms, including wide-ranging criminal bans impacting adults. The impact of these laws is often to force trans people out of public life, as they increasingly face double binds where their safety and freedom is at risk regardless of which bathroom they choose.