The past several years have brought a brutal onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, especially bills targeting the trans community. The ominous trend began in 2021, which broke the record for the most anti-LGBTQ+ laws enacted in a single year. Previously, 2015 held that record with 15 laws passed in a year and by May 2021, 17 such laws had been passed. In 2022, 29 anti-LGBTQ+ bills became law, and in 2023, a whopping 75 bills were enacted.
These attacks don’t appear to be stopping or slowing down any time soon either. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, a staggering 300 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have already been introduced in 35 state legislatures around the country (and in Puerto Rico) in 2024. For comparison, by January 19 of last year, independent researcher and Harvard Law instructor Alejandra Caraballo had tracked over 90 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in state legislatures.
Over half of 2024’s bills were first introduced in the prior legislative session, but even taking those re-introduced holdovers into consideration, 119 entirely new anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been added to the tally, which is still a significant increase from this time last year.
The ACLU categorizes nearly half of the bills as restricting student and educator rights, which includes bills that mandate forced outing, censor school curricula, and ban trans students from playing sports and using the correct bathrooms. The second biggest category is restrictions on healthcare, with 76 such bills introduced thus far, most of which ban or limit gender-affirming medical treatment for youth.
Oklahoma has introduced the most anti-LGBTQ+ legislation this year by far, at 40 bills — and the ACLU’s tracking doesn’t yet account for House Bill 3084, an anti-furry bill that we’ve argued is a thinly veiled anti-trans bill. The state is trailed by Missouri, which has introduced 28 bills, and South Carolina, which has introduced 26.
As the ACLU notes, not all of these bills will become law, but they are all harmful for LGBTQ+ people regardless of whether they pass. The mere introduction of such legislation legitimizes and amplifies anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric — after Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill was enacted in 2022, a report from the Human Rights Campaign found that the usage of slurs such as “groomer” and “pedophile” increased on X by 406% in the following month. These bills also have an outsized impact on LGBTQ+ youth. A 2023 survey on LGBTQ+ youth mental health from the Trevor Project found that nearly one in three respondents reported mental health that was poor “most of the time of always” due to anti-LGBTQ+ bills.
In a statement to The Hill, ACLU attorney Harper Seldin said, “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.” He added that the bills represent “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.”
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