Everything old is new, at least when it comes to the laws that limit how LGBTQ+ people present themselves and move in the world. As sliding bans and bathroom bills have proliferated across the country, it’s telling how similar they are to the kind of presentation bans — laws banning so-called cross-dressing, for example — that LGBTQ+ people have had to deal with for decades.
It’s a rehashing of the tired old saw that it’s okay to be queer as long as you’re not Look queer.
Presentation bans limited how people could dress based on traditional gender roles. It’s nothing new – these “cross-dressingThe laws date back to the mid-1800s. An early example was a 1848 Columbus, Ohio law prohibiting anyone from appearing in public in “a dress that does not belong to one’s sex.” These laws served to criminalize non-conforming gender presentation — and by the 1960s, these laws existed everywhere in the country.
Legal historian noted Kate Redburn last year that these laws were consistent with laws criminalizing prostitution, so-called sexual deviance and public indecency “as part of a larger effort to impose white Christian upper-class morality on the new urban masses.” These laws were directly challenged in court from the 1960s to the 1980s, but perhaps the biggest reason they largely disappeared was that once nonconformist aristocratic choices like women wearing pants became commonplace.
In by repealing a “cross-dressing” law. In 1975, for example, an Ohio court wrote that “at present, clothing for both sexes is sold that is so similar in appearance that “a person of ordinary intelligence” may not be able to recognize it as men’s or women’s dress.” . ” However, the United States has never fully broken the conservative impulse to enforce traditional gender roles, which is part of the reason we are now faced with new means of enforcement and control. And as before, these new anti-trans laws are part of a broad push to impose a very specific type of conservative white Christian morality on the nation as a whole.
It’s hard to remember that just eight years ago, North Carolina’s passage of a bathroom bill targeting transgender people resulted in an immediate—and expensive—backlash. The The NBA moved the All-Star game out of state, while the NCAA said it would relocate several tournaments. PayPal has been cancelled a planned operations center in Charlotte. Bruce Springsteen walked out of a concert in Greensboro. The law did not last a year before many comes back. But now, 12 states have laws requiring people to use bathrooms that match the gender they were assigned at birth.
The carry bans have faced more headwinds, suffering a series of failures in state legislatures and courts. Still, the defeats aren’t slowing down the conservatives. They just keep pounding state legislatures with proposed laws. Only in 2024, 25 accounts related to traction have been taken up in 12 states since publication, according to the ACLU.
Now, restrictions and proposed restrictions are so widespread that the large-scale boycott that North Carolina faced is impossible to imagine. Last year, California was forced to lift its travel ban. Originally passed in the wake of North Carolina’s 2016 law, the travel ban prohibited the use of state money for travel to states with anti-LGBTQ+ laws. However, as Republicans succeeded in passing a wide range of these anti-LGBTQ+ laws in 26 states, California’s ban on state-sponsored travel in more than half the country became untenable.
It’s not just transport bans and bathroom bans.
Last year, the The Texas Department of Agriculture has issued a dress code which requires employees to “comply with this dress code in a manner consistent with their biological sex.” The code does not specify what this means, because to do so would make it a much less useful tool for enforcing gender conformity. The code also buckled under the weight of modernity, recognizing as imperative that women were allowed to wear trousers.
These laws and codes inevitably go beyond criminalizing the movement of trans people. Gender non-conforming people like butch women or men are they are often caused when they try to use the bathroom. This is true even if, under the conservative requirement that people use bathrooms that conform to their birth gender, those people are, in fact, in the correct bathroom.
Some bathroom bills covers all K-12 schools, colleges and government buildings or grounds. Some cover only K-12 schools, while others cover some government buildings but not others, according to the Movement Advancement Project. The proposed carry bans are equally random: North Dakota’s proposed ban characterized all drag shows as “adult-oriented”, making them equivalent to strip clubs, while West Virginia lawmakers imposed a ban which appeared to criminalize trans people being around minors, period. The net result is that it is impossible to know for sure what is allowed and what is not.
This is a feature, not a bug. Just as earlier “cross-dressing” laws were vague enough to make any non-compliance treasonous, modern analogues do the same. Anyone who deviates from the mainstream of traditional gender presentations, regardless of whether they also happen to be queer, now faces intense scrutiny thanks to a patchwork of laws across the country.
All of these laws and proposals have one goal: to make LGBTQ+ people—or anyone else not married to traditional gender roles—feel uncomfortable and unsafe. If people feel insecure in this way, they will withdraw from public life or radically change their self-presentation to better conform. Conservatives are likely thrilled with either outcome, as either way, it will have robbed queer people of their ability to participate fully and authentically in society. And that’s exactly the point.
