A Republican consultant in Texas has launched a invoice that will make being transgender a felony within the state.
The invoice, authored by Rep. Tom Oliverson, creates a brand new crime of “gender identity fraud” punishable by as much as two years in state jail and a $10,000 tremendous.
Oliverson, who represents a piece of Houston, has not publicly commented on the invoice. It has not picked up any official help or co-sponsors within the Texas statehouse because it was filed on March 5.
“This fits right along with the agenda that we’ve been seeing pushed, for the past several sessions, specifically around policing of people’s gender and how they’re able to identify themselves,” Callie Butcher, founding father of an LGBTQ regulation agency in Texas, informed Houston Chronicle sister publication Chron.
Texas has spearheaded a number of efforts to persecute transgender folks, which have then been copied in different states. In August 2024, the state banned transgender folks from altering the listed gender on their driver’s licenses.
The state has additionally banned gender-affirming look after anybody beneath age 19, and one other invoice launched within the present legislative session seeks to outlaw such look after all Texans.
Oliverson’s “gender identity fraud” invoice would make it against the law to “knowingly [make] a false or misleading verbal or written statement to a governmental entity or [a] person’s employer by identifying the person’s biological sex as the opposite of the biological sex assigned to the person at birth.”
Since Texas representatives began introducing payments in late 2024, at the very least 50 have been filed to curtail the rights of transgender folks within the state, in accordance with the Transgender Schooling Community of Texas.
