Georgia legislators have introduced a bill that opponents are calling “mandated discrimination.”
On Feb. 7, lawmakers introduced House Bill 1128, which would end all legal recognition of transgender people by redefining biological sex. It would also remove sexual orientation and gender identity from the state’s criteria for hate crimes, effectively eliminating existing hate crime protections for queer Georgians.
The so-called “Women’s Bill of Rights” is part of a wider national trend of similar legislation, most of which appears to base their language off of model legislation cosponsored by conservative think tank Independent Women’s Forum. Among former IWF presidents is Nancy Pfotenhauer, who previously worked as the director of Koch Industries’ Washington office.
More than a dozen active bills across the country redefine sex in the same way, falsely asserting that there are only two sexes and terms like “mother” and “father” have strict, biological definitions.
Jeff Graham, the executive director of the queer advocacy organization Georgia Equality (GE), said HB 1128 is one of 10 bills GE is tracking this year that would harm the LGBTQIA+ community if passed.
Graham described the last two years as marked by targeted legislation against the trans community. In 2022, legislators nationwide focused on trans students in athletic programs; last year, the ACLU identified 42 bills restricting gender-affirming care for transgender youth. According to Graham, this newest wave of bills is a continuation of this pattern.
“It appears that now what we’re starting to see are these bills that try to redefine sex under state law in such a restrictive way that they really provide severe limits on the ability of transgender individuals to be fully covered under the law and have access to government in the same way that everybody else has,” Graham told Prism. “But [they] also open up the potential of rolling back protections against sex-based discrimination for large groups of people.”
OUT Georgia, formerly known as the Atlanta Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, issued a statement denouncing the bill and stating that it would harm intersex people, along with transgender and cisgender women alike. Graham agreed.
“[I]t could begin eroding the protections that all people, including—and very specifically—all women have around sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace, policing how women dress, and looking at definitions of parenthood that could be problematic to lesbian couples and others,” Graham said.
Nicole McAfee, executive director of advocacy group Freedom Oklahoma, said trans communities are already seeing the impacts of these bills in their state.
While Oklahoma lawmakers failed to pass their own laws redefining sex before the end of last legislative session, Gov. Kevin Stitt issued an executive order to that effect instead.
“One of the immediate impacts we saw is a real disruption in the ability for folks to get gender marker corrections,” McAfee said. “There’s just a lot of concern among judges about whether or not that is something that they would be allowed to grant … The other issues that we are concerned about are the fact that this bill would force people to be housed in carceral facilities that don’t match their gender.”
A 2015 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality found that incarcerated trans people are nearly 10 times more likely than average to be sexually assaulted by other incarcerated people. According to the survey, among trans women, women of color, specifically Black and Indigenous women, were most likely to have been incarcerated in the past year.
West Virginia lawmakers are pushing forward their own bill with the singular goal of forcing incarcerated people to be held in prisons and jails “based on their biological sex.”
Stitt’s executive order will expire once he leaves office. Given that Stitt is currently in his second term and Oklahoma governors are limited to two terms, Republicans have reignited efforts to codify this terminology through the legislature. Lawmakers are currently considering three bills with similar wording to the “Women’s Bill of Rights.”
McAfee said these restrictions could also lead to more stringent bathroom restrictions in public spaces, along with creating more barriers for queer parents.
“The definition of mother and father that are in the bill are gendered, but then still [use] pretty broad language,” McAfee told Prism. “And Oklahoma is already a state where we’ve seen some attempts to really whittle away at queer parents’ rights, especially parents who aren’t gestational carriers. And I think that there’s a question mark as to if this would further open the door to the rights of queer parents being attacked.”
In Georgia, Graham said he fears what HB 1128 will mean for hate crime proceedings.
Georgia has only had a hate crimes bill on the books since 2020, when Gov. Brian Kemp signed it into law after three white men murdered Ahmaud Arbery. That bill imposed penalties on those who target victims based on “race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender, mental disability, or physical disability.” HB 1128 would remove sexual orientation and gender from that list.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 21.3% of Georgia’s reported hate crime victims were targeted for their sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity in 2022.
The 2020 hate crimes law required the creation of a state database to track hate crimes, but statistics on how hate crimes are manifesting in the state are still incomplete due to inconsistent department participation.
If HB 1128 passes in its current form, Graham said those statistics would get even less clear because acts of violence against queer Georgians would no longer be recorded as hate crimes. Even with the existing hate crimes law, some of Georgia’s own police forces score worse than the majority of similarly sized cities when it comes to police violence, racial bias, and other outcomes.
So far it’s unclear whether HB1128 will proceed to the Senate, but Graham said the next few weeks will be a critical time for the bill.
“I think certainly people should begin reaching out to their own members of the House of Representatives, which is where this bill is right now, to share their concerns about this bill,” he said. “I encourage folks to sign up for the action alerts from Georgia Equality.”
As for Oklahoma, McAfee sees the passage of at least one of these bills as highly likely. Only two Republicans voted against the legislation redefining sex in the last session.
In the meantime, Freedom Oklahoma organizers are attempting to help the public engage with their representatives despite a barrage of obstacles: Oklahoma lawmakers are exempt from the Open Records Act and the Open Meetings Act, meaning they don’t have to post their meeting agendas 24 hours in advance. They also aren’t required to allow legislative testimonies from the public, and legislators don’t have in-district offices where their constituents can contact them.
So Freedom Oklahoma often brings residents to the capitol instead, despite what McAfee describes as an increasingly hostile state trooper presence when anti-trans bills are discussed.
She pointed out that these bills—in Oklahoma and elsewhere—have been introduced and re-introduced under shifting narratives. For example, when state Sen. Jessica Garvin (who is also carrying this year’s newly filed Senate Bill 1530) first introduced Senate Bill 408, she framed it as being in the best interest for health care providers to have accurate information about a person’s sex at birth.
“When it became clear that that pretense was not going to be accepted as the norm, she just increasingly leaned into the anti-trans narrative that drives a lot of these bills,” McAfee said. “It’s important to know that even for the folks who might start out saying that this is about women’s rights … oftentimes it is really clear to them at the end of the day that while they may feel uncomfortable naming the real reasons for it, it is rooted in transphobia and transmisogyny and is an attempt to erase trans folks from statute.”
