Regulating Gender To Allow Discrimination

As part of a broader, coordinated attack on transgender people across the country, these newly emerging laws explicitly regulate gender by defining “sex” throughout all state law to effectively allow discrimination against transgender people. These laws regulate gender and define sex as only male or female, typically based on a person’s presumed reproductive anatomy, chromosomes, hormones, or other physical characteristics at birth. These laws also define sex as a permanent category, implying that transgender people’s gender identity would never be legally recognized under state law. These laws could have dangerous implications for transgender people when it comes to bathrooms, identity documents, and other areas of law or policy, but because these government gender regulation laws are often vaguely written, the actual impact of these laws remains to be seen in each state.