Over 100 Anti-LGBTQ+ Laws Passed In The Last Five Years — Half Of Them This Year – By Kaleigh Rogers and Mary Radcliffe (FiveThirtyEight) / May 25, 2023
By the time students go back to school this fall in North Dakota, two new bills will be in effect restricting some transgender athletes from playing on school sports teams. Gov. Doug Burgum signed these bills into law last month — yet just two years ago, when a similar ban passed the North Dakota Legislative Assembly, Burgum vetoed the bill. He noted at the time that the state had no record of any trans girls competing in girls’ sports and that the state had “a level playing field and fairness in girls’ sports.”
This is still true — he made the same comments when signing the bills last month — so what changed? The state legislature had finally built the momentum and support needed to send these bills to Burgum’s desk with a veto-proof majority, the result of a multiyear effort by state Republicans to get these bills signed into law.
It’s a familiar trend for those who track legislation that restricts LGBTQ+ rights. Over the last five years, the number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills both introduced and passed into law at the state level has exploded, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis of data provided by the American Civil Liberties Union and The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ+ youth. Unsurprisingly, these bills are almost exclusively introduced and supported by Republican lawmakers, and the data reveals they aren’t coming up with new restrictions at random. Instead, these bills tend to follow cyclical patterns, with certain types of restrictions (such as school sports bans for trans athletes, prohibitions on gender-affirming care for minors and bathroom bills) gradually increasing in popularity for a year or two, then peaking with a huge wave of legislation in multiple states. Once laws have been passed, lawmakers move on and a new trend emerges.1 According to Cait Smith, the manager of state legislative strategy and rapid response for The Trevor Project, these cycles often include a few years of trial and error, in which bills are proposed and die before eventually passing after momentum and support has built — like in North Dakota.
CONTINUE > https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/anti-lgbtq-laws-red-states/
