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On April 19, as the clock ticked closer to the end of Iowa’s 2024 legislative session, Pete McRoberts was still at the statehouse with his team from the ACLU of Iowa. He had been there for nearly eight hours, dealing with a last-minute legislative fight that no one had seen coming. At 4 p.m., a bill to aid veterans’ families by extending the window to alter death certificates had been amended to become anti-trans. 

That sudden amendment had nothing to do with veterans or their families. It added a rigid definition of sex into the state’s already restrictive policy on how trans people can update their birth certificates, tying a measure harming a specific demographic to a piece of legislation meant to help people across the state. The amendment defined “sex” as “the biological indication of male and female … without regard to an individual’s psychological, chosen, or subjective experience of gender.”

To local LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, this meant transgender Iowans would be barred from updating their birth certificates at all. Without accurate personal identity documents, trans people face harassment or discrimination when going about their daily lives. 

In statehouses across the country, Republican lawmakers have been using this tactic for years. Legislation meant to benefit students, veterans and local industry has been changed on the floor, frequently at the last minute and without any chance for public comment. That’s on top of the bills that are gutted and replaced with anti-trans measures, a concerted strategy to pass anti-LGBTQ+ laws by any means necessary.

But something else is happening: As states try more extreme tactics to get anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the books, they are increasingly failing. Republican lawmakers have been refashioning state legislation meant to benefit everyone into bills that restrict the rights of a few. Increasingly, those bills are being pulled before they come up for a vote or voted down altogether. 

In the chaos of that last day of Iowa’s legislative session, the anti-trans amendment tacked onto a bill for veterans ended up being dropped at 10:30 p.m. by the same Republican who proposed it. He did not explain why on the House floor. But McRoberts recognized the ordeal as part of a bigger shift in Iowa, the same shift that other Republican-controlled states have undergone: Each year, lawmakers have gotten more and more aggressive in their attempts to pass anti-LGBTQ+ policies. 

By the national ACLU’s count, Iowa Republicans proposed the fourth-highest number of anti-LGBTQ+ state bills in 2024. Only four of those 37 bills were signed into law.

“We’ve killed this bill, but … bills can die, but ideas never do. We’re never safe until the legislature gavels out,” McRoberts said. 

Lawmakers have repeatedly made last-ditch efforts to pass anti-trans laws during the eleventh hour of their legislative session in recent years, notably in Alabama and Kentucky, where the bills were eventually signed into law. This year, Republican lawmakers across several states tried their hand at it again, derailing governance as usual on the waning days of legislative sessions by attempting to replace routine legislation with anti-LGBTQ+ bills or stonewalling the process of passing other bills to push anti-LGBTQ+ efforts, advocates say. 

This year, though, the ground has begun to shift. In March, during the last three weeks of Georgia’s legislative session, Republicans made a contortionistic effort to ram policies targeting transgender students into bills originally written to support all students in the state. Their target: a bill creating mental health screenings and other resources for student-athletes. 

That bill was reengineered into legislation to ban sex education below 6th grade, bar trans students from playing on sports teams that match their gender identity, prohibit trans students from using restrooms that match their gender identity and allow parents to be alerted about every library book that their child checks out. The irony is that while the altered bill still addressed mental health for student-athletes, research has repeatedly shown that anti-LGBTQ+ legislation harms students’ mental health. 

Then, Republicans refashioned a piece of legislation requiring overdose reversal drugs in government buildings to include a ban on puberty blockers for transgender youth, a move that blindsided Democrats, the Georgia Recorder reports. Georgia Republicans had already banned hormone replacement therapy for trans youth in 2023 — but that wasn’t enough.

Changes to both of these bills were made without opportunities for public comment, as Jeff Graham, executive director of LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Georgia Equality, previously told The 19th. But transgender Georgians, their families and allies fought back and won. They faced the largest number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills ever introduced in one legislative session in the state. Still, none of those bills passed, including the legislation that added last-minute language into unrelated bills. 

Former State Rep. Mauree Turner of Oklahoma, the first out nonbinary state legislator in U.S. history, got used to Republicans flouting the rules during their term in office. They watched as Republicans repeatedly brought motions to suspend the rules to add new amendments into bills, gutted original bills and added transphobic language. 

Turner, a Democrat, said they watched Oklahoma Democrats, particularly party leaders, respond to rising anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and policy with ambivalence. In a state where Republicans control both chambers of the legislature, Democrats were too afraid to make waves or alienate their conservative colleagues by discussing trans people, they said. For example, Turner pushed for Democrats’ public discussions about abortion access to be trans-inclusive. They were told that it wouldn’t be effective messaging to reach Republicans. But Republicans already don’t listen to them, they said — so why water down the message? 

“We’re elected officials. This is where we have the power to make the shift and the change. We should be doing more,” they said. 

Oklahoma Republican lawmakers have been refashioning noncontroversial bills to push anti-trans policies for years. 

In 2022, during a special legislative session, Oklahoma Republicans proposed that a bill dealing with state payroll systems be replaced with a bill banning gender-affirming care for trans youth at state-funded hospitals. The bill passed, halting care at Oklahoma Children’s Hospital at OU Health. That’s the largest gender-affirming care provider in the state, said Cindy Nguyen, policy director for the ACLU of Oklahoma. 

“Sometimes we don’t get notice of these changes unless we are tracking it 24/7,” Nguyen said. “There are several bills that have nothing to do with anti-queer bills that overnight turn into something else.”

In 2023, Oklahoma Republicans asked that a bill asserting the “rights of individuals in Oklahoma to use internal combustion engines and gas-fueled stoves” be replaced with a bill that would redefine sex based on reproductive capacity and exclude transgender people from civil rights protections, employment protections and educational benefits. The bill did not pass. 

This year, Oklahoma lawmakers introduced 55 anti-LGBTQ+ bills, more than any other state. Only one of them became law. To Nguyen, that lack of traction was largely caused by Republicans under pressure from their constituents after the death of 16-year-old nonbinary student Nex Benedict, who died after being bullied by schoolmates. Lawmakers wanted to avoid the negative national spotlight cast on the state following Benedict’s death, when the state superintendent for Oklahoma’s public schools doubled down on his view that transgender and nonbinary people do not exist. 

“Even though they may introduce anti-trans bills, I think they realize that it could possibly cost them reelection, or further highlight the bad spotlight on us,” Nguyen said. “A lot of parents and teachers and students are really angry about what happened to Nex.” 

Oklahoma Republicans made fewer attempts at replacing routine laws with anti-trans laws this year because of the groundwork they laid the past four years, Turner said. Anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry and rhetoric have become bigger and bolder, to the point where Republican lawmakers don’t have to hide their harmful policies as much as they had to before. 

“This year, blatantly bad bills were started at the beginning of session. They didn’t have to hide the bigotry because they knew Democrats weren’t going to really fight back,” Turner said. 

In Missouri, which tied Tennessee for the second-highest number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced this year, far-right Republicans stalled business as usual to push anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. 

It took over four weeks for the Missouri Senate to debate any bills once its legislative session started. The state’s newly established far-right Freedom Caucus had formally joined the state legislature.

Missouri passed 50 bills into law this year, the fewest since 2020, when the onset of the coronavirus pandemic shut down the country. From 2021 to 2023, the state General Assembly passed around 70 bills into law each year. Shira Berkowitz, senior director of public policy and advocacy with PROMO, Missouri’s LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, attributes this legislative slowdown to dysfunction caused by friction between mainstream Republican lawmakers and their far-right colleagues.

The crux of that infighting was often anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric spread by the state’s newly established Freedom Caucus, Berkowitz said. The State Freedom Caucus Network, which aims to push the Republican party further to the right through obstructionist tactics, has 11 states in its membership. The group’s stall tactics this year, frequently used to push anti-abortion measures, caused Missouri Senate leaders to remove four members from their posts as committee chairs and assign them parking spots as far from the Missouri Capitol as possible. 

In a state that should be prioritizing rural school districts and passing nondiscrimination protections, the infighting, dysfunction and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric made this past legislative session especially exhausting, Berkowitz said. Although the infighting helped prevent anti-LGBTQ+ bills from being passed, it also created more opportunities for anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric to spread from the statehouse into political campaigns and media sound bites, they said.

“Grown adults who are elected to represent constituents, who are being paid out of taxpayer dollars, cannot be held accountable. They aren’t accountable to each other, can’t be held accountable by the people, and just run amok. It’s crazy,” they said.