Tennessee lawmakers send anti-transgender bathroom bill to governor's desk
Tennessee’s Republican-dominated Legislature voted Thursday to send legislation to limit access to facilities at residential education programs “by immutable biological sex” to Gov. Bill Lee’s (R) desk, where it is expected to be signed into law.
Tennessee senators passed House Bill 64 Thursday in a 25-4 party-line vote. The proposal, one of several this session to zero in on transgender young people, is geared toward summer camps and pre-college programs that allow students to stay overnight.
The bill’s sponsor, Tennessee Republican state Rep. Gino Bulso, told a House subcommittee in February he introduced the legislation after an unnamed constituent complained to him that the directors of a summer program their daughter planned to attend at a local private university asked them whether their child would share a room with a transgender girl.
The constituent declined, according to Bulso, but told the lawmaker the program’s organizers also failed to inform them their daughter would be sharing bathroom and shower facilities with the transgender student.
“The purpose of this bill,” Bulso said in February, “is just to see to it that this does not continue to happen in the state of Tennessee.”
The state House voted 74-18 in favor of the bill earlier this month. Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R) ordered troopers to remove at least one protester from the gallery after Majority Leader William Lamberth (R) cut off debate.
State Rep. Aftyn Behn, a Nashville Democrat, said the move was part of Republicans’ “pattern of weaponizing their supermajority status to either punish a disparate worldview or block minority voices from the conversation,” according to The Tennessee Lookout.
Tennessee Republicans during Thursday’s Senate debate said the measure is needed to protect women and girls’ private spaces. Democrats and state LGBTQ rights groups, which have called for Lee to reject the legislation, said the bill unjustly and disproportionately impacts transgender youth, who make up just a fraction of the population.
“I don’t think any of us ever hear from our constituents that they want us to come up to the legislature to bully trans people,” said Democratic state Sen. Heidi Campbell. “These issues are very personal, and the government, in my opinion, should not have a role in it.”
Tennessee law already bars transgender students in K-12 schools from using facilities and playing on sports teams that match their gender identity. In 2023, the state was among the first to adopt a law rigidly defining sex as only male and female, determined “by anatomy and genetics existing at the time of birth.”
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