Indiana Republicans want to re-write the law to eliminate the word “gender”

A design for a flag to represent Transgender individuals, Designed by Michelle Lindsay.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A new bill proposed by Indiana Republican lawmakers would legally erase transgender people and reaffirm the state’s ban on same-sex marriage.

H.B. 1291 would remove the word “gender” from state laws and replace it with the expression “biological sex,” including in anti-discrimination laws. The bill also redefines the terms “male” and “female” to be based on whether someone can produce sperm or ova and redefines other gendered terms based on body parts.

This would effectively erase trans identity from the law, banning trans people from correcting gender markers on their documents to reflect their lived reality.

It says that intersex people are male or female “but for a medically verifiable genetic disorder of sex development,” which is related to a common conservative idea that all intersex people can be easily categorized as male or female.

“Only a female may marry a male. Only a male may marry a female,” the bill reads in a section that lists state laws and how they need to be changed to implement the new, anti-trans definitions. “A marriage between persons..

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