Texas Republicans this week pre-filed a slate of bills to pursue at the next state legislative session in January that seek to prevent children from seeing drag shows and would classify sex-change procedures for minors as child abuse.
State Rep. Jared Patterson (R-Frisco) on Nov. 14 filed
HB643, which seeks to reclassify businesses that permit drag performances as “sexually oriented” businesses under Texas Local Government Code.
“I filed HB643 so that any business allowing a drag show must be classified as a sexually oriented business and if kids are permitted that there will be consequences,” Patterson
said on Twitter. “You’re living in bizzaroworld if you think it’s family friendly to stuff dollars into the g string of a grown man.”
Drag shows have, until recent years, occurred mostly in bars, nightclubs, and other adult-oriented events. But recently, lewd, adult-oriented drag performances have occurred with young children present or participating at venues not classically considered to be “sexually oriented businesses.”
Texas Local Government Code
defines “sexually oriented” businesses as sex parlors, nude studios, adult bookstores, adult movie theaters, adult motels, or any “other commercial enterprise the primary business of which is the offering of a service or the selling, renting, or exhibiting of devices or any other items intended to provide sexual stimulation or sexual gratification to the customer.”
Over the summer, state Rep. Bryan Slaton (R-Royse City) described
recent drag shows as a “disturbing trend in which perverted adults are obsessed with sexualizing young children.”
Other Bills Seek to Expand Child Abuse Definitions to Ban Sex Change Procedures
Other bills filed this week by Republican state lawmakers in Texas would classify sex change surgeries for minors as child abuse and ban doctors from performing them.
With
HB42, filed on Monday, Slanton seeks to amend the definition of child abuse to include “the purpose of attempting to change or affirm a child’s perception of the child’s sex if that perception is inconsistent with the child’s biological sex as determined by the child’s sex organs, chromosomes, and endogenous hormone profiles.”
State Rep. Cole Hefner (R-Mount Pleasant) filed a similar bill on Monday. Like Slanton’s bill,
HB672 would amend the definition of child abuse to include giving puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to minors for sex-change procedures, as well as performing or consenting to sex-change procedures or surgeries for minors.
Intersex children are exempt under certain conditions.
State Rep. Steve Toth (R-Woodlands) filed two separate bills,
HB41 and
HB122, which aim to ban doctors from performing sterilization procedures on minors.
Sterilization procedures include castrations, vasectomies, hysterectomies, oophorectomies, metoidioplasties, orchiectomies, penectomies, phalloplasties, and vaginoplasties.
The bills would also prohibit professional liability insurance policies from covering physicians or health care providers who perform sex-change procedures or treatments that are prohibited from damages.
Under these bills, physicians who violate the prohibition could lose their license to practice medicine, and it could result in a second-degree felony.
Toth also filed HB631, which bans classroom instruction on gender ideology or sexual orientation from pre-K through to fifth grade, similar to Florida’s parental rights bill, which critics labeled the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Earlier this year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released a formal opinion that concluded performing certain “sex-change” procedures on children was the equivalent of child abuse.
