More Republican-led states seek to follow Trump’s lead in defining male and female

Demonstrators march to the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery this month to protest bills that would affect transgender people. For example, after Kansas enacted its law in 2023, the state stopped allowing transgender people to change their birth certificates and driver’s licenses so that the listing for “sex” would match their gender identities. Conservatives pushing the bills often argue that states have an interest in protecting “women-only” spaces such in bathrooms, locker rooms and sport teams and prevent transgender women from accessing them. Trump has boosted the idea that there are two unchangeable sexes in a series of executive orders that call for moving transgender women in federal prisons to men’s facilities, barring gender-marker changes on passports, ending federal funding for gender-affirming medical care for transgender people under 19, kicking transgender service members out of the military and removing transgender women and girls from women’s and girls’ sports competitions. He said if the bill were to pass, it would force him as a trans man, who has a “beard and receding hairline,” to use the women’s facilities, and that any woman “not deemed feminine enough could be a target for harassment.” “This bill will put Alabamians under the threat of violence and harassment.