AUSTIN (KXAN) — In a late night meeting of the Texas Senate State Affairs committee Thursday, advocates spoke for hours against a bill that would codify a gender binary in Texas law, if passed.
House Bill 229 would require state government officials to identify Texans in official records as male or female. It would also define those terms in Texas law as being based on a person's genitals.
It passed a third vote in the Texas House of Representatives on Monday.
It was the last bill heard during the Texas Senate's State Affairs Committee meeting on Thursday. The bill's sponsor in the Senate, Mayes Middleton, laid out the bill to the committee.
"This bill responds to a growing concern that definitions of sex and public policy are being rewritten without legislative input or public debate," Middleton said. "HB 229 makes it clear there are only two sexes and that legal definitions must reflect biological reality and not political trends. Texans deserve to know their laws are based on objective, verifiable standards, not ideology."
Some of the bill's opponents voiced concerns that it would erase intersex people from records. And, many biologists argue that a sex binary is overly simplistic and ignores the complexity of human life, according to reporting by the magazine Nature in 2015. Multiple testifiers who held doctorates spoke against the bill on these grounds.
Despite the patience of Texans who waited all day to testify, committee members seemed disinterested in hearing them out, according to Transgender Education Network of Texas Policy Coordinator Landon Richie.
"It's frankly an insult to our integrity that you, who care so little about the harm you're causing, are either absent altogether or here on your phones, ignoring the people who you work for. It's childish, and it tells us everything we need to know," Richie said. "Even if this bill becomes law, it doesn't change the fact that a world without trans people has never existed and never will."
In God's image or based in science?
While numerous opponents spoke during the rest of the hours-long hearing -- a repeat of the bill's April 25 public hearing in the Texas House -- just four attendees spoke in favor of the bill.
One of the bill's supporters spoke on the Christian concept of Imago Dei, the belief that God created humans in Their image. Christian denominations vary in how they apply the concept -- some use it in support of gender expansive people.
The bill couches its necessity in a claim of being supported by science, and does not make a faith-based argument.
Mary Elizabeth Castle, government relations director for the religious advocacy organization Texas Values, said that "sex is the most basic way that we define reality."
"It may seem that in 2025 is the surprise that such law is needed to define man and woman, but over the past decade, the biological reality of sex has been redefined by gender ideology, and the most egregious example has happened over the past four years with the Biden administration rewriting Title Nine and basically erasing women's rights guaranteed by that law."
A seminary student, who identified as non-binary, spoke against the bill during the hearing:
"This bill would pigeonhole me into a category that doesn't fit who I truly am, and it does that without making me any safer, as it purports to do," they said. "If we are made in God's image, and we are fearfully and wonderfully made, shouldn't that include all our permutations and shouldn't our records reflect the beautiful diversity of humanity?"
Separate, but not unequal?
The bill, as passed in the Texas House, states that men are "bigger, stronger, and faster than females" It uses this and other claims to argue that biology necessitates men and women require sex segregated restrooms, changing rooms and prisons.
"The legislature finds that ... in the context of biological sex, 'equal' does not mean 'same' or 'identical' and separate is not inherently unequal," the bill reads.
Castle took issue with opponents calling this wording segregationist language and argued it was "the whole reason" behind Title XI of the Civil Rights Act.
"That's just to basically clarify that men and women deserve their separate spaces, but in order for women to have equal opportunities ... in education and sports because of those biological difference," she said. "That's not to be confused with separate but equal, which is the phrase used in Plessy v. Ferguson, which was separate facilities and separation of people, and claiming that those separate things were equal and so those things aren't the same."
The bill, which doesn't restrict access to sex segregated spaces, makes no mention of how the state would ensure equality across those spaces. While HB 229 does not attempt to enact a ban, its supporters have referred to it as an important step towards such a ban.
"[Trans people] represent unbridled freedom and the possibility; no, inevitability; of another world, a world that is beautiful and fluid, that invites interpretation and expression and individuality, a world that allows for existence without constraint, without rigidity, without the idea that a sexed existence is predestined and immutable, a world that frees not just us, but everyone," said Richie as he concluded.
The bill was left pending Thursday night. The Texas Senate has until May 28 to consider the bill.
