State Laws Are ‘Leveraging Criminalization as a Tactic Against Trans People’

State legislators have passed hundreds of anti-trans laws since 2020, and proposed even more bills. A growing segment of those laws create new criminal penalties that could now lead to jail or prison time in 10 states.

That’s according to legal data from Movement Advancement Project (MAP), which tracks anti-LGBTQIA+ laws. MAP’s research identifies 14 laws across 10 states that now make it a misdemeanor or felony to perform in drag, use a bathroom that isn’t aligned with the state’s definition of “biological sex,” or provide gender-related health care to transgender youth. 

Logan Casey, MAP’s director of policy research, analyzes these laws. The period since 2020 marks what he described as a “modern era” of anti-LGBTQIA+ bills, which have started “to escalate — and escalate dramatically.”

“The bills themselves, as well as the ones that are getting enacted, are becoming more extreme over time, as evidenced by a growing number of states that have criminal components or criminal penalties,” Casey said. 

In 2023, the majority of these criminal penalties were attached to health care practitioners or drag performance. But they have expanded to include restrictions on bathroom use, which explicitly target trans people. The scope of bills is also becoming more extreme: They began as being limited to K-12 public schools but have since expanded to cover government buildings more broadly and even some bathrooms in privately owned schools and prisons.

This year alone, Kansas and Idaho have enacted new laws that make it possible to charge trans people with a crime for using the bathroom. Idaho’s bathroom ban, signed in March, extends to private businesses, and a second offense could lead to felony charges with up to five years in prison, making it the most severe of its kind. 

Transgender Idahoans and Kansans have separately sued over each law. The lawsuit in Idaho argues that the new law presents an “impossible choice” between safety and arrest — a dilemma that more trans people are facing nationwide.

Due to this spate of recent laws, a Prism analysis found that approximately 1 in 4 trans people in the U.S. now live in a state that has created a new criminal penalty tied to various aspects of trans life. 

Breaking down the laws

Of the anti-trans bills that have become law in the U.S., many have not created new criminal penalties. For instance, most restrictions on providing youth gender-affirming care include fines and other civil penalties, such as making it easier to file a malpractice action against a professional who provides trans medical care. But some laws make it a felony for medical providers to provide gender-affirming health care to transgender youth.

Laws that create new criminal penalties provide more direct routes to charging individuals with misdemeanors and felonies that may put them in jail or prison. This has added consequences for LGBTQIA+ people, who report experiencing disproportionate rates of violence, harassment and abuse in every facet of the criminal legal system, from arrest to incarceration. The Trump administration has also been dismantling the already-limited protections for incarcerated transgender people, including prison rape protections. 

MAP tracks several key policy areas in which new laws have created criminal penalties related to LGBTQIA+ life:

• Drag restrictions that identify either “adult performance” or drag itself as potentially criminal
• Felony provisions for medical professionals who provide transgender health care to youth
• Bathroom bans, which introduce misdemeanor or felony charges for transgender people who use public or private bathrooms under certain circumstances

Bathroom bans specifically target trans people. But even adult performance restrictions and medical care restrictions, which may not explicitly criminalize trans people themselves, threaten LGBTQIA+ communities and support systems in ways that create fear in public spaces and disrupt access to key services. Research has shown that interrupted medical care creates “psychological, physical and financial harm” to transgender people.

Jasmine Tasaki, executive director of the prison abolition organization Black & Pink, said that the criminalization of trans people and their networks of care has broad ramifications.

“Those parents, those friends of trans people who are under attack experience that violence as well,” she said. “To have new laws that actually condone the violence and the othering really creates this fear, not only in trans communities, but in communities that are not trans-identified.” 

Casey, the MAP policy analyst, said that trans people of color may be especially harmed by bathroom bans and similar laws that increase scrutiny and surveillance in public space.

“The criminal justice system already has disproportionate impacts on people of color, transgender people and other already-vulnerable communities,” he said. “Any time we’re talking about creating a new crime, a criminal penalty like this is going to exacerbate or be part of those existing impacts.”

According to Tasaki, these laws and their increase in penalties enable the state to place more LGBTQIA+ people in jails and prisons. As part of a 2015 report, Black & Pink surveyed incarcerated LGBTQIA+ people and found widespread discrimination behind bars. 

Some policies that don’t create criminal penalties may still make trans people more vulnerable to criminalization. For instance, the recent Kansas bathroom ban law also invalidates trans people’s existing, state-issued driver’s licenses if they reflect a gender different from a person’s sex at birth. 

Whether or not a law explicitly creates a new criminal penalty, Casey said, “the broader point here is that the state is leveraging criminalization as a tactic against trans people.”

New laws echo old laws

Jules Gill-Peterson studies transgender legal history and has written extensively on how trans people have been “overwhelmingly criminalized” throughout time. She stressed that today’s “regressive policies are not being invented out of thin air.”

In the U.S., laws dating back to the 1840s forbade people from appearing in public “in a dress not belonging to their sex,” Gill-Peterson has written. These laws threatened low-level misdemeanors that could create a “revolving door” of arrests and short-term jail time, she told Prism, but often did not lead to long-term prison stays.

Discrimination was more “ad hoc,” Gill-Peterson said, because trans people often were not directly and explicitly targeted by the law due to their gender identities. Rather, bureaucratic and administrative processes pushed trans people out of traditional economies and public life. As a result, they were often targeted by police because they participated in sex work and had few economic resources at their disposal.

What’s happening now looks different — and in some cases is “completely unprecedented,” she said.

“Today, those same vulnerabilities that arose piecemeal are being intentionally weaponized to single out and target a minority population,” Gill-Peterson said. “We’ve never seen this kind of political targeting of birth certificates, bathrooms — those things have never carried deliberately targeted, politically motivated criminal penalties in the past.”

Contemporary anti-LGBTQIA+ bills often come from the same far-right groups. In 2023, the Associated Press linked many of the health bills to the anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQIA+ group the Family Research Council and the group Do No Harm, which opposes gender-affirming care and has sued to stop scholarships that support hiring nonwhite doctors and end programs that support Black medical patients. The Alliance Defending Freedom, which spends millions on anti-LGBTQIA+ policy work globally, also provides the framework for many bills, according to reporting and analysis that traced language reused across state legislatures. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated all three organizations as hate groups.

Historical efforts were uncoordinated and in many cases ultimately overturned, Gill-Peterson said. Statewide laws like those being passed today were rare, and most laws that Gill-Peterson has identified were instead part of municipal codes. Still, she said, the echoes of New York’s “three-article rule” — which required people to wear at least three items of clothing aligned with the gender they were assigned at birth — among other forms of discrimination against transgender people, are still apparent in today’s anti-trans policy onslaught. Gill-Peterson’s research has documented how anti-Black racism has also been a key element of anti-transgender discrimination, as police began repeatedly and deliberately arresting Black transgender women in the aftermath of the Civil War. During this time, according to Gill-Peterson, the press and pro-slavery politicians used high-profile criminal cases to frame Black trans women as “inherently deceptive and criminal,” while invoking societal fears about challenges to white political power.  

“It’s part of history, not just of conservatives, but of liberals too,” she said. “It was in the bedrock of the country. It might not be super apparent. People aren’t looking for it. But it didn’t get excised from the American political body.”

The consequences

While new state laws have created criminal penalties, it’s unclear how often authorities are actually arresting and charging people.

Florida’s Safety in Private Spaces Act, passed in 2023, assigns a trespassing offense to anyone who enters “a restroom or changing facility designated for the opposite sex at a public building and refuses to depart when asked to do so by an employee of the governmental entity for the public building that is within the governmental entity’s jurisdiction.” Depending on the circumstances, the penalties for trespassing can range from a misdemeanor with a few months’ imprisonment to a felony carrying multiple years.

In Florida, a transgender woman protested the bathroom ban by washing her hands in a women’s restroom; the case against her was ultimately dismissed. Multiple news outlets reported that she was the “first person” arrested under the new law. In public records, charges like hers are associated with trespassing, making additional cases tied to the Safety in Private Spaces Act difficult to distinguish from other types of trespassing.

The Florida Department of Education has not yet responded to a public records request filed by Prism in late 2025 that sought records related to schools’ bathroom policies.

Other laws with criminal penalties have faced delays in implementation and court challenges, while additional factors make it hard to tell exactly how many people have been jailed or imprisoned because of them. Some, such as Kansas’ 2026 bathroom ban, are too new to show clear patterns of enforcement. Others, such as Tennessee’s 2023 adult performance restrictions, contain vague language that has sparked legal challenges. A federal judge ruled the law unconstitutional and “overbroad,” but a federal appeals court later reversed that decision. The word “drag” does not appear in the statute, though Tennessee legislators named drag shows as the target of the ban.

A legal analysis from the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee noted that the lack of clarity around the law’s purpose creates “fear and confusion,” which can lead to “self-censorship” and the feeling that drag performance may be a “risky choice.” Drag performances have continued since the law’s enactment.

Anti-LGBTQ+ laws with less severe penalties, such as those that require schools to notify parents if students change their names or pronouns, have similarly hard-to-quantify consequences. For example, in Indiana, public records requests showed that different school districts interpreted a statewide parental notification law in different ways. Some applied it to only transgender students while others applied it to all students who changed their nicknames. A similar district-level policy in Katy, Texas, was enforced just a few times in the 2023-24 school year, but still resulted in severe consequences for some students, including Kadence Carter, who dropped out of high school just two days after the policy was implemented. Katy’s policy later led to a Biden-administration discrimination investigation.

Casey warned that even if anti-LGBTQIA+ laws are not consistently enforced, or don’t directly create new criminal penalties, there are still consequences posed by the threats and fear they incite. 

Trans people are fleeing hostile states, but even hospitals in Democrat-led states have started to drop trans health care for youth. Adults are also struggling to find care and large numbers of LGBTQIA+ youth are also seeking mental health services, pushing organizations to the brink. Stigmatizing political environments also have public health consequences. Research now links anti-LGBTQIA+ laws to significant losses of tax revenue in states such as Missouri.

“These are bad for any state that they’re passed in. They are bad for the economy, they are bad for LGBTQ people and their families, and they’re bad for everybody who lives in that state. There are so many actual problems that Americans of all backgrounds are facing that these bills do absolutely nothing to solve,” Casey said.

Despite the cascading consequences of anti-LGBTQIA+ laws, states continue to adopt them, and their scope continues to expand. 

In the meantime, Tasaki pointed to mutual aid and intracommunity support as a powerful form of resistance to the fear, uncertainty and violence posed by these laws. “We have always taken care of ourselves. That is the experience of being trans-identified: knowing that you and your community can hold you,” she said. “I don’t have any fear about us making it out of this.”

Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.