Almost 300 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have already been filed across the country in 2024

The first two weeks of 2024 have seen approximately 285 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in state legislatures – more than half the massive number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills proposed in all of 2023.

A legislative tracker from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reports that, among other restrictions, 71 of these bills target health care, 21 seek to ban drag shows, seven would create barriers for trans folks to access accurate IDs, 46 attempt to weaken civil rights laws, and 130 propose censoring school curriculums.

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Oklahoma has currently proposed the most anti-LGBTQ+ bills with 36, followed by Missouri with 28, and South Carolina with 26.

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Trans folks continue to bear the brunt of these legislative attacks. “Transgender people across the country are enduring a historic and dangerous effort to control our bodies and our lives, fueled by extremist politics with the goal of erasing us from public life,” ACLU attorney Harper Seldin told The Hill.

“Taken together, these proposals are a blatant effort to deny transgender people the freedom to be ourselves at school, at work, and the support of the medical care many of us need to live. We at the ACLU and our nationwide affiliate network stand ready to defend our freedoms and our families from this baseless assault.”

Some state legislatures are spending so much time attacking LGBTQ+ people that they don’t have time for other business. “This happened last year on a number of occasions,” journalist Erin Reed told the Washington Blade.

She said that Missouri had a day last year where they debated “several sports bans and several health care bans and then several drag bans in the same day.”

“The idea, I think, is to truly wear people down,” she said.

As the GOP continues to demonize LGBTQ+ people as a way to gain favor among their conservative constituents, the bills they’re proposing have become more and more outlandish.

Among the GOP bills introduced in legislatures this year is Florida’s H.B. 1135, which targets “groomers” and is a thinly veiled attempt to criminalize the existence of LGBTQ+ people and content.

The one-page bill, H.B. 1135, makes the act of “lewd or lascivious grooming” a second-degree felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. While LGBTQ+ content is not explicitly mentioned in the bill, Republicans have popularized using “groomer” as an anti-LGBTQ+ slur, with many claiming that any exposure to LGBTQ+ identities is a sexualization and grooming of children.

Another bill proposed in Indiana would legally erase transgender people and reaffirm the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. H.B. 1291 would remove the word “gender” from state laws and replace it with the expression “biological sex,” including in anti-discrimination laws. The bill also redefines the terms “male” and “female” to be based on whether someone can produce sperm or ova and redefines other gendered terms based on body parts.

There is also West Virginia’s S.B. 194, which would ban gender-affirming care for young trans adults and require state-licensed mental health professionals to practice conversion therapy on transgender people. The bill also claims that being transgender is a “sexual deviation” and compares it to pedophilia.

In the wake of all of this, two major trans rights organizations – the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and the Transgender Legal Defense Fund (TLDEF) – have announced plans to merge so they can fight hate with “double the influence” and “double the power.”