A large number of anti-LGBTQ legislations were introduced across states during the past years, as reported by human rights organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and Trans Legislation Tracker.
More than a thousand bills have been drafted to restrict LGBTQ rights, mostly cracking down on transgender community’s access to healthcare, sports and privacy. There was also a reawakening of religious values that sought to regulate sexual orientation and affirm traditional gender roles.
In its effort to understand the surge of hatred, Pavement Pieces conducted a months-long investigation and spoke with multiple legal scholars and state legislators across the political spectrum.
Using the ACLU’s anti-LGBTQ legislation tracker, our reporter built a detailed database of 1,344 LBGTQ-related legislations that were introduced between 2019 and 2024. Pavement also reviewed hundreds of legal documents and created an algorithm that helped find a striking number of bills that used the same language.
The algorithm search revealed that almost 200 anti-LGBTQ legislations — about a fifth of the total number of bills introduced during the past six years — followed specific patterns and appeared to be drafted off a series of templates.
The most popular template is sometimes referred to as the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act,” which intends to exclude transgender females from participating in women’s sports on high school level. The Pavement algorithm reported a text similarity of over 97 percent. That is, for the bills that have an average number of 485 words, about 97 percent of the texts are verbatim.
The similar pattern was found to persist through multiple issues, and some of the most debated are as follows:
- 42 bills concerning gender affirming care: prohibits the prescription of puberty blocker, cross-sex hormone and gender altering surgeries, or the subsidization of such, for minors under the age of 18;
- 41 bills concerning transgender sports: prohibits transgender athletics to play sports with the opposite sex;
- 34 bills concerning religious exemptions: prioritize religious freedom over human rights, which specifically will allow adoption & foster care agencies, healthcare professionals and school faculty and employees to discriminate against LGBTQ kids and same-sex couples;
- sex definition: defining sex as a separate term form gender identity, and rules that sex is an immutable trait that comprises only male and female based on the chromosome and reproductive organs;
- sex education: no education on sexual orientation or gender identity until an “appropriate age of development;” some bills also require faculty and employees to out their students;
- “parental rights”: to grant parents full surveillance over their kids, including what they learn at school, and any chance to their first name and pronouns
Chris Mooney, Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago who spent decades studying lobbying, said the templates are often referred to as model legislations. They are drafted by professional lawyers and lobbyists and made available for legislators. The legislators almost always adopt them — the professional templates save the legislators from the cumbersome research and help their bills survive the legal reviews.
“It makes it easy for lawmakers to put in a bill,” Dr. Mooney said.
In most cases, the anti-LGBTQ templates are products of conservative groups or religious organizations. By searching some of the most widespread clauses on the internet and in legal databases, Pavement Pieces was able to trace to the authors of a few of the most wide-circulating model legislations.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative group that highlights “traditional American values,” drafted templates to define sex, prohibit the use of a different first name or pronoun and allow parents to have full surveillance over their kids.
Do No Harm, a medical-political group that believes DEI and “youth-focused gender ideology” are undermining healthcare, published a model legislation concerning all aspects of gender affirming care.
All groups declined to respond to Pavement’s interview requests.
Copies of their model legislations were found to have been introduced in multiple states legislatures. The Pavement algorithm reported:
- 19 copies of Family Research Council’s Save Adolescents from Experiments Act, 6 of them have been passed into law;
- 7 copies of Do No Harm’s The JUSTice For Adolescent and Child Transitioners Act, 2 of them have been passed into law
The author of the widespread “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act” is not immediately traceable, but 28 of such bills were found to have been introduced into state legislatures and 15 of them were passed into law. The legislators who were among the first to introduce the templated bills declined to respond to a Pavement interview request.
And the Family Research Council, which has lobbied for the “Save Adolescents from Experiments Act” and appeared to be the author, used vague language to describe its relationship with the model legislation.
“Family Research Council actively recommends and supports the Save Adolescents from Experimentation [SAFE] Act,” the organization writes on its website.
The organization declined Pavement‘s interview request.
Dr. Haider-Markel said the lack of transparency poses a concern to the society, although there is no law that requires legislators to disclose the source of their ideas.
“I could definitely see especially right leaning groups not wanting that publicity,” he said.
In addition to the legislators who copy and paste the entire templates verbatim, others borrow only sections from the model legislations.
John Kavanagh, a long-time Republican legislator who introduced bathroom and pronoun bills into the Arizona senate, said he used language from a model legislation by Heritage Action For America, a sister organization of The Heritage Foundation.
“I got the gist of my pronoun bill from Heritage Action,” Sen. Kavanagh said, “it’s kind of crazy for a legislature, regardless of what the topic of the bill is, to remake the wheel every time.”
Dr. Mooney said the American legislative system is specifically designed for legislators to work hand in hand with the lobbyists, as it takes the burden off the legislators.
“How’s he gonna write that bill? I mean, is he gonna spend a lot of time learning, reading textbooks on gender issues, even reading stuff from folks in the family or something like that? It’s a lot of work, right? Much easier just have the lobbyists walk in and say, ‘Hey, I got a bill you like. This is what it does, and this is what we’ll do for you,’” Dr. Mooney said.
The same clause borrowed by Sen. Kavanagh also appeared in 79 other bills, the Pavement algorithm shows. A larger scale text comparison analysis found that more than half of the anti-LGBTQ bills contain language from the model legislations listed above.
And the legislators sometimes rely on lobbyists and journalists to set their agenda. Sen. Kavanagh said he has introduced multiple bills that were sent by lobbyists to his email inbox. Mark Peake, a Republican Senator in the state of Virginia who introduced bills to ban gender affirming surgery and limit transgenders’ access to sports, said he was motivated to introduce the transgender sports ban after he saw a news report of a transgender female cross-country runner winning first place.
“It stood out to me because my wife and I, our friends, their daughter, was running cross country in Virginia at the time, and she set every state record and got a scholarship and ran for UVA,” he said. “And it just kind of saw how hard she worked and what she did, and if a biological male was running against her and took away her state records and her state championships – what a travesty.”
Sen. Peake also recognized that he didn’t read any of the research the conservative groups attached to their mode legislation. Instead, he relied on his “conscience.”
“I have not reviewed the research and mine’s [the bills] not based on that research at all,” Sen. Peake said.
Arthur Leonard, a professor at New York Law School whose expertise focuses on LGBTQ laws, said such over generalization may bring more harm than benefits.
“You can count on the fingers of one or two hands the number of transgender girls who are participating out of the thousands of girls are competing. So there isn’t a serious problem that has to be dealt with,” he said.
“What we need is something that’s sensitive to individual cases.”
The legislators don’t always source their bills from lobbyist groups. They also learn from each other. Sen. Peake said he took some language from a bill that was passed in “other states.”
“I looked up … just do a Google search on the issue ‘What states have passed a law on …’ and they would come up, and then we would go to the statute, we printed out what their bill was,” Sen. Peake said.
Dr. Mooney said in this case, the legislators are more likely to be politically motivated to introduce the bills.
Donald Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas and the author of The Oxford Encyclopedia of LGBT Politics and Policy, said the recent collaboration of conservative legislators and lobbyists is a cultural backlash to police the bodies and affirm traditional gender roles.
“It’s a result of the gains made by the trans community since the early 2000s, especially at the local and state level, in terms of passage of anti-discrimination laws that protect gender identity,” Dr. Haider-Markel said.
According to The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, an LGBTQ advocacy and cultural change organization, 23 states have established a law that “explicitly prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.” Some states offer partial protections, and 16 states still lack basic respects for the LGBTQ community.
But the Democratic legislators have been less active during the current battle over LGBTQ issues. They introduced significantly less bills, and the categories are mostly limited to nondiscrimination protections. From 2019 to 2022 — the ACLU stopped recording pro-LGBTQ bills after this period — legislators across 50 states collectively introduced 180 pro-LGBTQ bills, less than a third of what their Republican counterparts.
The Democratic legislators also used model legislation. They learnt from each other, too. Among the 123 nondiscrimination bills introduced to amend the statues, 19 of them used language that is exactly the same.
Dr. Leonard said the LGBTQ community and their allies are at a great disadvantage because the current science does not provide enough knowledge on everything transgender, especially on gender affirming care.
“We don’t have long-term, double-blind studies,” Dr. Leonard said. “The lack of long-term controlled studies means that opponents of gender affirming care for transgender minors, will say, since we don’t have good data on this, the state should be able to step in and say, in the absence of good data showing that this is beneficial, we should be allowed to outlaw it.”
His claim is confirmed in the model legislation. In Do No Harm’s model legislation, the organization created a legislative findings section where it listed a number of information on which their bills are based.
“The cause of the individual’s impression of discordance between sex and perceived sex or between sex and perceived gender is not definitively known, and the diagnosis is based primarily on the individual’s self-evaluation,” the model legislation writes.
During the past three legislative sessions, bills regarding the two most debated issues, gender affirming care and transgender athletics, have been introduced in 48 states and 29.
With LGBTQ issues coming under the spotlight, Dr. Mooney said he expects there to be more attention, and the states that don’t have an anti-LGBTQ legislation will be receiving them.
Sen. Peake’s have repeatedly introduced bills concerning gender affirming care and transgender athletics over the past two years, ever since he read about those issues in the news. His bills have been voted down during the debate, but he said he will keep introducing those bills to “protect kids and female athletes.”
On the forefront of the anti-LGBTQ legislations, eight states have pre-filed 86 anti-transgender bills, according to Trans Legislation Tracker. The Pavement algorithm found over half of them to be based on one of the known model legislations.
