Trans bathroom bill dies in Texas House — again

After similar legislation failed to pass in 2017, the Texas GOP’s bathroom bill redux has died in the Texas House as this year’s session sputters to a close.

The bill, which would have barred transgender Texans from using bathrooms that don’t align with the gender they were assigned at birth, fizzled in the lower chamber, turning months of rabid Republican grandstanding into much ado about nothing.

Ironically dubbed the “Texas Women’s Privacy Act,” the bill raised alarms in no small part due to the necessity of overstepping women’s privacy to enforce the law and determine whether someone’s biological sex aligns with the bathroom they enter.

The murky and invasive process of enforcing such a measure has created awkward situations in other states, such as Arizona, which has repeatedly struggled to pass its own bathroom bill. A Tucson cisgender woman went viral in February for flashing security guards to prove her birth gender after they followed her into a bathroom to interrogate her.

The Texas legislation, Senate Bill 240, would have applied to bathrooms, locker rooms and other facilities in public buildings, including schools, universities, city halls, county courthouses and libraries. The measure passed in the Senate on April 24 but stalled out in the House after being referred to committee.

The 2017 bathroom bill died an anti-climactic death after a year-long crusade to ensure its passage by Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, one of the Lege’s most strident culture warriors. As with the current legislation, the Patrick-championed measure failed to move forward in the House.

SB 240 was one of more than 120 anti-trans bills filed in the Texas Legislature this session, according to Trans Legislative Tracker. That total represents a record number of bills targeting a group comprising less than 1% of the state’s population.

Other harmful anti-trans bills have been more successful than SB 240, including House Bill 229, which requires state documents to reflect a person’s assigned gender at birth. That piece of legislation awaits signature on Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.

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This article appears in May 29 – Jun 11, 2025.