Proposed Texas Bill Would Classify Identifying as Transgender as a Type of Fraud

The onslaught of legislation targeting transgender rights has hit a new extreme with a proposed Texas bill that would make attempting to identify as transgender on a legal document a form of fraud. While the bill is unlikely to pass, it’s still frightening to see it even proposed in the first place and demonstrates the extremes that the right wing will go to in their attempts to legislate transgender people out of existence completely.

Chron, a sister publication of The Houston Chronicle, reports that State Representative Tom Oliverson proposed House Bill 3817 last week, which would invent a new type of fraud called “gender identity fraud” which would make it a crime to “”identifying the person’s biological sex as the opposite of the biological sex assigned to the person at birth.” The bill primarily applies to changing gender on legal documents, which was already banned in the state last year. This new bill would essentially take the next step of charging people with a crime for attempting the process of changing their gender marker on documents. “Gender identity fraud” would carry a penalty of up to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Chron points out that the bill is unlikely to be passed into law, especially as it has no co-sponsors. However, as Chron also points out, Florida has already essentially taken this step as, when they outlawed changing gender markers on documents, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles issued a memo stating that “misrepresenting one’s gender, understood as sex, on a driver’s license constitutes fraud.”

Even as the bill faces likely defeat, it has created a lot of fear and anger amongst the transgender community and their advocates. Today it’s a bill that’s likely to fail, but another year down the road, there might be more support for such measures. If the current right-wing push to legislate trans people out of existence continues, then moves like this will begin to be more commonplace. So far, nobody has been charged with fraud under the Florida law, but it remains to be seen what level the right-wing will go to in order to ensure compliance.