Last weekend, as I celebrated Mother’s Day with my family and opened the artwork my sons eagerly presented to me — their mom — the Texas House debated HB229, a bill that tries to answer the question “What is a woman?” by defining a “woman” as “an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova.”
I listened as supporters of HB229 laughed when their fellow lawmakers raised significant concerns about how this bill would result in the erasure of the identity of hundreds of thousands of transgender and intersex Texans. I listened as lawmakers raised concerns about the negative effects on women that could arise from the bill’s statutory findings that women are indeed not equal to men, and further that “separate but equal” is legitimate.
I listened as the author and supporters of HB229 repeated the absurd argument that the mere development of a person’s internal organs identifies them more than visible evidence, the way society perceives them and their lived experience.
As a transgender woman, I listened as the Texas House voted to deny my humanity, the validity of my everyday experience and the legitimacy of my role as a mother.
The author calls HB229 the “Women’s Bill of Rights.” However, contrary to this name, the bill does not provide women with any additional rights or protections. Instead, HB229 creates incredibly narrow definitions of sex and gender that are entirely based on the existence or non-existence of internal organs not visible to the eye. When pressed about why this bill is necessary, its author and supporters have very little to say beyond the usual anti-trans arguments: sports, bathrooms and private spaces.
But HB229 isn’t truly about sports; Texas banned transgender participation in sports in previous sessions. And it isn’t truly about bathrooms and private spaces; that’s SB240, another bill currently in front of the legislature.
As you read HB229, it’s clear the justification is the belief, not backed by science, that God created only “male” and “female” and that men and women have different roles in society that are biologically determined at birth.
With that understanding, it is not surprising that the definitions in HB229 reduce the definition of “woman” to the ability to get pregnant and give birth to a child. Nor is it a shock that they are specifically drafted to exclude the approximately 123,000 transgender Texans from any legal recognition or protections based on their gender identity. It is also not surprising that HB229 ignores the overwhelming scientific and medical consensus that reproductive organs alone are not determinative of a person’s sex and can be in conflict with a person’s own innate gender identity, which has its own biological underpinnings.
Similarly, for the estimated 600,000 Texans who are intersex, many of whom will not discover they are intersex until much later in their lives, HB229 simply declares that intersex people are not a third sex and must be defined as either male or female — even though many intersex folks do not fit into either definition in HB229. Take the case of a woman who was identified as a girl by doctors at the time of her birth, grew up identifying as female, got married and began trying for a baby, only to encounter fertility issues. Doctors discovered that internally she does not have ovaries but testes. She doesn’t produce ova, so under HB229, is she now legally male?
Indeed, HB229 is not only scientifically and biologically inaccurate, it is also detached from our real-world experience of gender. For example, when I walk into a coffee shop, I don’t look at the person behind the counter and think, “Does this person produce ova, or does their reproductive system fertilize the ova of a female?” to assess their gender. The person behind the counter has the ability to express their gender identity to the world through clothing, hair, voice, colors, music, symbols, name, the language they use, the list goes on, and we, as humans, have the incredible ability to take in all the information that a person shares with us about who they are and perceive their gender identity with astonishing speed and accuracy
Because HB229 uses rigid definitions of male and female, it denies trans people the ability to access documents that accurately reflect who they are. In doing so, HB229 undermines the purpose of identification documents — to verify that a person is, in fact, who they say they are.
Consider me, a transgender woman who has taken steps to bring my body and lived experience into alignment with my gender identity. In my life, I’m nearly always correctly perceived as female by others. Strangers assume my spouse is male and that I birthed my children.
For me, an ID or a birth certificate with a male gender marker would conflict with my identity and others’ perception of me. It would cause others to question whether I was actually the same person reflected on those documents, exposing me and my children to invasions of privacy, discrimination, humiliation, harassment and possibly violence.
HB229 is not a declaration of rights; it is a declaration of erasure. It sends a chilling message to every transgender and intersex Texan that our lives are inconvenient obstacles to a rigid worldview and reduces the profound complexity of human identity to a binary rooted in anatomy alone, ignoring established science. It tells me that despite the life I’ve lived, the family I’ve built and the woman I am, I do not exist in the eyes of the state.
To every person reading this who feels unseen or erased by this bill: You are valid, you are real, and you are not alone. We are not abstractions or ideologies. We are people. And no piece of legislation, no matter how cruelly crafted or cleverly disguised, can take away the truth of who we are.
Callie Butcher is a Dallas-based attorney, mother, community leader and vocal advocate for the rights of the LGTBQ+ community.