A Texas City, Once at the Center of Anti-Trans Efforts, Now Offers Hope
After previously passing legislation offering “bounties” on trans people using bathrooms not matching their gender assigned at birth, Odessa deems the ordinance unenforceable.
by Mira Lazine
In Texas, where dozens of proposals attacking transgender people have already been pitched for the coming year, a hopeful sign has emerged nonetheless: The west Texas city of Odessa, notorious for adopting one of the most extreme anti-trans bathroom measures in the country, has now declared the ordinance unenforceable, a step taken after voters ousted the council members and mayor who had pushed it through.
The bathroom ordinance had been “added as a final act of a lame-duck council and creates the potential for lawsuits to be brought against the city,” the city said in a statement posted on Facebook soon after the Nov. 5 election had remade the council. “The ordinance contains language that city staff has deemed unenforceable.”
The city’s bathroom ban came into full effect this fall, calling for “bounties” on supposed offenders and creating a right for private citizens to file suit against them.
Just weeks later, though, Odessa voters sent the mayor and three council members to defeat. The new mayor, Cal Hendrick, and the new council members, Craig Stoker, Eddie Mitchell, and Steve Thompson, have promised to revisit the ordinance in full.
The election that transformed the council was a direct result of community action, Alexander Ermels, a transgender resident and a leader in the local LGBTQ+ community, said in an interview with Assigned Media.
“We showed our voices in this last election, and we elected a new mayor and we tossed out the old one,” he said. “The point of a city council is to protect and stand for the people, and we felt as though we were not being protected or stood up for.”
The lesson, Ermels said: “Trans people in Odessa, your voice matters.”
“Going to the meetings and being there and continuing to live and be open and be yourself is the greatest act of resistance that you could ever do to show people that we are here,” he added.
The new council includes the city’s first openly gay member, Stoker. He and the other new members had campaigned on local good governance issues such as improving infrastructure and city services, a stark counterpoint to the national “culture” issues that had been the foundation of the old council’s approach.
Conservative advocacy groups had played a major role in shaping the prior council’s priorities.
Jonathan Saenz, president of the advocacy group Texas Values, spoke for about 40 minutes on behalf of the bathroom ban at a council meeting this fall, a time allotment far exceeding that of other speakers. Saenz has made extreme anti-LGBTQ+ claims for many years. In 2014, for example, he claimed that LGBTQ+ activists want to “put people in jail” if they don’t support “the homosexual lifestyle.”
The new council has begun following through on its promise to review the entire ordinance. At a meeting this month, members expressed a desire to remove the “private right of action” provision over concerns about the city’s own liability, which the American Civil Liberties Union had outlined in a letter.
“The ordinance that was approved by the last council is probably unconstitutional [and] discriminatory,” Mayor Hendrick said.
The state of Texas has already begun leading the charge in introducing new anti-trans measures. The independent journalist Erin Reed has documented over 120 anti-trans bills introduced across the United States for the coming legislative session, the majority of which are from Texas and Missouri. Two of the Texas bills, House Bill 239 and Senate Bill 240, follow the Odessa model in allowing trans people to be sued for using the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity.
Odessa’s ordinance, Ermels said, was “a testing ground for what those bills would look like.”
Ermels emphasized the need to hold the city’s new leaders accountable. “Now is the time for us to not let up,” he said. “Politicians will promise you things to get elected and it is your responsibility as a member of the community to hold them to those promises.”
He asked cis people to speak out as well. “I know that it's scary but the people who hate trans people respect you more as a cis person than they do us. Your opinion has weight and because of that being an ally is so important.”
The new city council has stopped short of promising a complete revocation of the bathroom restrictions, violations of which are considered a misdemeanor offense. The ordinance itself had been on the books since 1989, but it never had any clear enforcement mechanism and was largely ignored until the council acted this fall.
The city council member who had led this fall’s campaign to impose harsh penalties, Christopher Haney, is still in office.
Haney made a not-so-veiled comment during a city council meeting in October that led up to the adoption of the harsh restrictions. Referring to trans women who might enter the same bathroom as his granddaughters, he said, “I don’t care who goes in there with them, they ain’t coming out with them.”
When Ermels objected to the comment by immediately running to the podium to question Haney, he was escorted out of the meeting by the police. His offense: Speaking out of turn.
Mira Lazine is a freelance journalist covering transgender issues, politics, and science. She can be found on Twitter, Mastodon, and BlueSky, @MiraLazine