AUSTIN — LGBTQ organizers in Texas say their battle against what they see as harmful policies won’t stop just because the state’s legislative session has ended.

“The fight is not over to stop these bills or to push back against these bills,” said Brad Pritchett, interim CEO of Equality Texas. “The session’s over. The fight now moves into the hands of some of the legal organizations and into our hands on how we provide resources and for the community moving forward.”

Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to sign legislation in the coming days to codify the state’s position on biological sex, requiring such data to be recorded in state government and electronic health records. Abbott wrote in a January letter that “Texas recognizes only two sexes — male and female” — and that all state agencies must comply with that “biological reality.”

Other gender-identity bills awaiting Abbott’s signature center on parental rights. A sweeping parental rights in public education bill includes provisions to ban instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, social transition assistance and student clubs based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Another would protect parents who don’t affirm their child’s gender identity or sexual orientation from the state’s definition of child abuse and neglect.

Abbott signed a bill last month that will require health care plans that cover gender-transition procedures or treatment to also cover “all possible adverse consequences.”

‘Groundbreaking laws’ were ed

ers of the conservative proposals say the Legislature ed “groundbreaking laws” that parents, lawmakers and advocacy groups can be proud of.

“These bills that were ed were not a small feat at all,” said Mary Elizabeth Castle, government relations director at Texas Values. “All of these bills are very important.”

LGBTQ Texans and their allies saw some of the strongest proposals to crack down on the state’s population of roughly 123,000 transgender people this session go nowhere. Bills to criminalize “gender identity fraud,” expand the definition of child abuse to include a parent’s affirmation of their child’s gender identity, and ban all gender transition and gender reassignment procedures and treatments never received a committee hearing.

“There were some pretty egregious and really scary bills filed this session,” said Landon Richie, policy coordinator with the Transgender Education Network of Texas.

What was sent to the governor “could have been worse,” Richie said, “but that doesn’t diminish the fact that this session was really, really bad, and the bills that ed … will have some really devastating impacts.”

Advocates on both sides of the LGBTQ policy debate say the next front in the battle is an education campaign with stakeholders. There could also be legal challenges before the bills go into effect Sept. 1.

ers have cast some of the bills as an effort to protect women, parents and students. House Bill 229 defines male, man, female and woman based on biological reproductive systems and requires government entities to collect vital statistics identifying a person’s sex for compliance with anti-discrimination laws and public health, crime, economic and other data.

“HB 229 actually goes a lot further than maybe what the critics are claiming,” Castle said. “When it comes to gender identity, all these local entities, local governments, they will have to recognize biological sex as male and female and not have a policy that basically gives a man access to a woman’s sports, opportunity or private space.”

Under Senate Bill 1188, electronic records from health care insurers, researchers, facilities and providers must include a patient’s biological sex and information on any sexual development disorder. The policy doesn’t prohibit such records from including a person’s gender identity, but the biological sex could only be amended to correct a clerical error or if the patient is intersex.

The proposal expands on a policy inside Texas’ departments of public safety and state health services, which stopped accepting court-ordered changes to amend a person’s driver’s license and birth certificate last year.

SB 12 creates a statewide policy out of what some school districts had already implemented to prevent teachers from affirming a student’s social transition from one gender to another and to require parental notification of such behavior from students.

HB 1106 allows parents to legally reject their child’s gender identity or sexual orientation, giving them a green light to use their child’s birth name and pronouns based on their biological sex, even if the child’s name was legally changed to reflect a new gender identity.

Bills have ‘real-world implications’

During legislative debates and public testimony, Democrats and LGBTQ people repeatedly warned of mental and physical harm the policies could cause, such as depression, suicidal ideation, abuse from parents and child homelessness.

“This does have real-world implications,” said Cameron Samuels, co-founder and executive director of Students Engaged in Advancing Texas. “These bills deprive us access to safe spaces that could be life-saving — of medicine, of resources, of everything.”

Samuels said the bills send a clear message to LGBTQ Texans “that we deserve not to exist, that our existence is fake and unworthy.”

Advocates from LGBTQ groups said although the impact of some bills is straightforward, others are less clear and could differ depending on each agency’s implementation.

Pritchett, of Equality Texas, said his organization is working with insurance providers to offer legal analysis of SB 1257, the bill mandating detransition coverage, and seek commitments from them not to cut access to health care.

“Some of the providers may actually already be doing what this bill calls for,” Pritchett said. “If you are detransitioning, that’s also gender-affirming care. So if you have a plan that covers gender-affirming care in principle, it may already be doing what that bill calls for. It may not change some plans at all, but we don’t really know what the providers are going to do.”

Pritchett encouraged Texans who receive gender-affirming care to appeal if coverage for care is denied. He said such denials are frequently overturned.

Richie said TENT is concerned the mandate for insurers to cover “limitless and unknowable costs” could make health care unaffordable for transgender Texans.

“Insurance companies are by nature risk averse and do not want to take on any costs that they cannot calculate and cannot for,” Richie said.

Vanessa Sivadge, president of Protecting Texas Children, did not respond to an interview request through the organization’s website. But in a recent social media post, she said children’s God-given identities “can never be socially redefined or medically reassigned no matter how loud the other side is.”

“I represent Christ,” Sivadge said. “It is because of my faith in His good and beautiful design for our gender that I can walk into committee hearings knowing that it is not my job to change anyone’s mind, but to speak the truth in love to a culture dominated by chaos and confusion.”

LGBTQ advocates lamented that lawmakers advanced legislation this session despite overwhelming opposition from the public during committee hearings. They accused the Legislature of pursuing culture war issues to excite the Republican base.

“We saw elected officials who were supposed to be serving the public focused on all the problems that we don’t have to create problems that help them appease their conservative base’s hunger for conflict and fear,” Samuels said.

“What we’ve seen , what we’ve seen get prioritized has been about a political agenda,” Pritchett added. “And it really is about providing red meat for a base of voters so that some lawmakers get to go home and when reelection rolls around, they get to claim that they did something that nobody asked them to do.”