Southern Queer Newsroom
Senate Bill 8, a bathroom bill targeting transgender Texans, is now being enforced after passing the House and being signed by the Governor.
The law set massive penalties for any government-owned or operated building that did not take "every reasonable measure" to prevent trans women from using the women's restroom and vice versa. Originally setting a day-one penalty of $5,000 and a recurring penalty of $25,000 a day, the penalties were jacked up by five times their original value to punish Democrats for resisting in the House. The law also contains language designed to prevent it from being challenged in court as unconstitutional – a blatant attack on the ability of the courts to hold a legislature responsible for violating people's civil rights.
In a contentious hearing in the Texas House Committee on State Affairs, the bill was derided by lawmakers and members of the public for not defining what "every reasonable measure" means, targeting trans people for further humiliation by both the state and everyday Texans, and continuing a streak of bigotry stretching from Jim Crow and before. Supporters, meanwhile, engaged in gleeful transphobia, admitted to wanting to castrate a trans woman in San Antonio, and said the law would override local anti-discrimination ordinances if they didn't comply with the new law. During that hearing, a constable who worked as security in a government office said "We're not interested in being the potty police," to general laughter from the audience.
The State of Texas has decided they need potty police anyways, and have enlisted State Troopers to do their dirty work.
According to reporting from Texas Tribune, a group of protestors went to the Texas State Capitol to test the state's enforcement of this law. State law enforcement officers, all men, stood guard outside of the women's restrooms and demanded ID checks for every person seeking to use the restroom. Gender markers on IDs could be changed up until 2024, when the Department of Public Safety (DPS) began denying court orders recognizing someone has changed their sex. Texans have been banned from changing their gender markers since September 1, 2025, with the enactment of House Bill 229.
Evidently, IDs that were changed before that date, or issued out of state, appear to be enough to allow trans women to use the women's restroom, despite supposedly being banned from such spaces. Matilda Miller, a protest organizer and president of the new 6W Project, told the Tribune "I think that the Texas government just established that they have no consistent enforceable standards for this law." For this protest, four trans women with 6W were given criminal trespass warnings and banned from Capitol grounds for a year.
This protest follows others in the state capitol against this legislation. During consideration of SB 8, protesters with the Gender Liberation Movement, occupied a women's restroom with a banner reading "Flush Bathroom Bigotry" and were expelled from the building by police.
This law would not just apply to the state capitol, but also every public building belonging to any government inside the state of Texas, including county public schools, libraries, parks, and city halls. While the current method of enforcement at the state capitol is "men with guns check your ID," there is nothing in the law mandating or prohibiting genital inspections. As such, it remains to be seen how schools and other public facilities will attempt to enforce this law to avoid the penalties.
There are many troubling aspects of this legislation, from Rep. Orr's refusal to say gender non-conforming cis women should not be harassed by members of the public, to anti-lawsuit language challenging over two hundred years of legal review of unconstitutional legislation, to refusing to prohibit genital inspections of children, to the continued erasure of intersex identities in the pursuit of maximum harm.
The law also mandates trans women be placed in male-only facilities, exposing them to vastly more physical and sexual abuse. According the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, there are roughly 1,750 trans inmates in state custody, far above the estimate of 273 (page 48) in Georgia Department of Corrections custody affected by Senate Bill 185.
It is currently unknown if the law is being challenged as unconstitutional.