Will 2023 Set New Record for Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation?

When 2021 saw a record-setting number of more than 190 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced to Republican-dominated state legislatures around the country, it was just the start. 2022 broke that record, setting a new one – more than 340 – in the process.

Now, NBC News reports, 2023 is on track to follow the same pattern, exceeding even last year's number of bills seeking to limit the rights of sexual minorities.

In a story dated Jan. 14 – two weeks into the new year – NBC News detailed that, "More than 100 bills targeting LGBTQ rights and queer life – from transgender health care to drag shows – have been filed in 22 states for 2023 so far," with more... many more... expected.

Unsurprisingly, "Texas has taken the lead with 36 such bills," NBC News relayed, while "Missouri is next with 26, then North Dakota with eight and Oklahoma with six."

Efforts targeting transgender youth make up the bulk of the bills this year, as they have for the past two years. Such bills seek to limit or deprive access to gender-affirming health care for transgender youth, and target doctors with severe consequences if they provide hormone therapy or surgery to their transgender patients – even if, as in one Oklahoma bill, the patients in question are legal adults.

"At the age of 21 you can drink, but at the end of the day if you decide to put the alcohol down, you can put the alcohol down," NBC News quoted Oklahoma State Sen. David Bullard as saying. "But with this surgery, there is no going back. We just want to make sure that the brain is fully developed before we allow this kind of surgery, permanent thing to happen."

Already, NBC News noted, "Four states – Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee and Arizona – have enacted restrictions on gender-affirming medical care for minors, though federal judges have blocked them from taking effect in Arkansas and Alabama."

Medical care involving surgery is not common for younger transgender patients, NBC News pointed out. "Before puberty, trans young people might socially transition, meaning they might change their name, pronouns and clothing," the article elucidated.

More common are puberty blockers, an entirely reversible form of hormone therapy intended to give transgender youth more time and the mental space not to be confronted with the development of unwanted secondary sexual characteristics.

Even puberty blockers are offered to transgender youths "only if they meet a list of criteria" intended to ensure that the gender-affirming therapy remains indicated for each individual, NBC News detailed.

Right-wing stories around trans youths, however, disregard those medical safeguards and the expertise that comes with them, with lawmakers and pundits excoriating gender-affirming care as "abuse" and "mutilation" of children and, frequently, falsely suggesting that genital surgery is typically rushed into even with young children.

Also driving the spate of anti-LGBTQ+ bills in recent years have been debates around transgender students participating in school sports, with supporters of bills designed to prevent transgender girls from playing on teams that match their gender identity. Sponsors of such bills say they are "protecting girls," though trans-female athletes are rare.

But a new focus has also emerged in the latest slew of bills hostile to LGBTQ+ people, NBC News noted: Drag shows.

"Bills filed in Arizona, Arkansas, Montana, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia would ban minors from attending drag performances and seek to classify any business that hosts such performances as a cabaret or a 'sexually oriented business,'" evidently without regard to the content of such shows, which typically involve cabaret-style singing and stand-up comedy sets.

A bill in Arizona seems to acknowledge that it is designed to smear such performances as "sexual" even if they are not, stipulating that "businesses that host drag performers... be zoned as adult performance venues," while at the same time defining a drag performer as "a person who dresses in clothing and uses makeup and other physical markers opposite of the person's gender at birth to exaggerate gender signifiers and roles and engages in singing, dancing or a monologue or skit in order to entertain an audience" – with no hint of sexually inappropriate material in the act being needed to force drag performers to be classified as belonging solely in "adult performance venues."

In a troubling sign of more to come, Wisconsin lawmakers blocked a measure that would ban the ineffectual – and, critics say, dangerous – practice of so-called "conversion therapy," a sham treatment that purports to "convert" LGBTQ+ people into cisgender heterosexuals. The practice has been banned for minors in 25 states and various cities and counties around the U.S., but the move by Wisconsin state Republicans could herald the undoing of progress toward protecting LGBTQ+ youth from being subjected to a process that survivors – and medical experts – have likened to torture.