“How Texas’ “bathroom bills” have evolved over a decade” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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Safara Malone cherishes the public school environment she grew up in that accepted who she was as a young trans woman. The acceptance, the 20-year-old said, allowed her to flourish and focus on her education, giving her the support she needed to get to where she is now, as a Harvard University student.

That support was fragile, though. For half of her life, Texas lawmakers have made targeting the rights and public privileges of trans people in the state a legislative priority, she said. At the forefront of that push has been a so-far unsuccessful effort to restrict what bathrooms transgender people can use, something Malone said would have infringed on the little moments that made her high school experience so positive.

“I mean, just going to gym class or being able to get ready and do my makeup with my friends before school, those are all really important and cherished memories that are part of just being a young teen,” said Malone, who now serves as a policy intern for the Transgender Education Network of Texas.

With the second special session of 2025 underway, Gov. Greg Abbott has again placed bathroom restrictions based on sex assigned at birth on the legislative agenda. During the first special session, the Texas Legislature made another push toward passing a “bathroom bill” in the form of Senate Bill 7, which would ban trans people from using restrooms at schools or government buildings.

Now Senate Bill 8 in the second session, the bill and its lower chamber counterpart, House Bill 52, are the latest iterations of the roughly 16 bathroom bill proposals across more than 20 different bills and dozens of other anti-trans legislation filed in Texas since 2015. The two bills incorporate provisions from several of these previous versions and other bills to shift how transgender people would be treated in bathrooms, prisons and family violence shelters.

The bills follow a raft of other legislation state lawmakers have passed — banning trans athletes’ participation on certain sports teams, state definitions of sex and gender transition care bans — that all spurred from the initial fight to pass a bathroom ban.

“We protected girls’ sports, we protected women’s sports, we passed the bill to define male and female … and now the last piece of this equation is putting the penalties in the law,” Sen. Mayes Middleton said on the floor during the first 2025 special session as the upper chamber passed SB 7.

The first bathroom bills

Most legislators point to 2017 as the first instance of a bathroom bill being filed in the Texas Legislature, when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick included the bans among his legislative priorities, prompting an initiative that ultimately died in the House. And while Senate Bills 3 and 6 from 2017 are the basis of most current bathroom bills, the first series of proposals in the state were made in 2015, filed by two former House representatives.

Bathroom bills in Texas usually propose fining institutions when trans people use their restrooms, however most of the original slate of bills in 2015 proposed arrests, including one that would have made a violation a felony. The author of that bill, former state Rep. Debbie Riddle, said that trans people’s presence in public “wasn’t a topic of conversation” at the time. Still, the Tomball Republican’s concerns were largely the same as current supporters: that public accommodations for transgender people went against rationale and biblical truths.

“We are politically correcting ourselves out of common sense and ordinary decency for the everyday people that make our cities, and our state and even our nation a wonderful place to live,” Riddle said about maintained opposition to a bathroom bill. “No pun intended, we’re flushing it down the toilet.”

Neither of Riddle’s two bathroom bills or two others filed by former Pasadena Republican Rep. Gilbert Peña in 2015 were heard. Of the four bills, only one from Peña proposed civil fines over criminal charges: House Bill 2801 would have allowed students who shared bathrooms with transgender students to sue their school.

HB 2801 also would have required that schools provide accommodations for students with gender identities separate from their sex assigned at birth and capped exemplary damages from the suits at $2,000. Yet, even without criminal penalties, HB 2801 was seen as a bridge too far. Then-chair of the House State Affairs committee Byron Cook told the Associated Press that HB 2801 needed to soften its language before it could be heard in committee. The bill was never revised and left unheard.

Although HB 2801 failed, its suggestion that schools could be sued for violations became the primary enforcement mechanism every future bathroom bill proposal adopted. Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, carried the two bathroom bills in 2017, and built on HB 2801 by creating a flat fine for violations in addition to any fees that could come from lawsuits. Those bills failed after receiving a firestorm of public opposition, as opponents called the bills discriminatory and pointed to a 2016 bathroom bill in North Carolina that caused economic backlash in the state.

“The pendulum swinging back”

After 2017’s tumultuous battle, conservative lawmakers took a step back from filing bathroom bills for six years, instead shifting their focus to other hot-button issues affecting trans people: sports and health care. After a brief period in 2019 in which no major anti-trans legislation was filed, dozens of bills in 2021 sought, and were ultimately successful, in barring trans youth athletes from competing on sports teams matching their identifying gender at the interscholastic level.

In supporting those restrictions, proponents found a new message: that keeping trans athletes out of women’s sports would protect female athletes from unfair competition.

Transgender people make up roughly 1% of the U.S. population and represent an even smaller share among athletes. Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said the new framing around protecting women was a reaction to growing acceptance of trans people in the United States, which he called “the most divisive idea” in the country.

“Conservatives and the Republicans are not the ones that started pushing these policies that led to problems with men and women’s private spaces and sports, it was the left,” Schilling said. “The reason they say it’s divisive is because they don’t want to address it … And so, we’re ending it, and we’re going back to normalcy.”

In 2023, the state moved the ban up to the collegiate level, and banned medical gender transition care for minors. Those legislative victories for Republicans, combined with the newfound messaging aimed primarily at women and children, provided a groundwork proponents of the bathroom bill could later point to — and opportunities to expand their scope.

During the 2025 regular session, Senate Bill 240 was dubbed the “Texas Women’s Privacy Act,” and encompassed not just bathrooms in public schools and government agencies, but also aimed to restrict family violence shelters and prisons. Brian Klosterboer, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said the ground gained by conservatives focusing on trans youth has made support for bathroom bills and prison restrictions affecting trans adults easier.

“Unfortunately, those attacks have been quite effective,” Klosterboer said. “We’re still in the early days of these new attempts to restrict the freedoms of trans adults, and I can see the pendulum swinging back.”

Growing support and concern

SB 8, which is also titled the Women’s Privacy Act, increases penalties for violations, changing the $1,000 first-time fine proposed in Kolkhorst’s 2017 bill to $5,000. Opponents of the bill said that these fines incentivize potentially overreaching enforcement like visual inspections of people entering bathrooms and could be abused.

“If someone like a [cisgender] man is mad at the City of Austin and is going into the women’s restroom to cause a violation, there’s no safeguards or guardrails on that civil right of action,” Klosterboer said. “So any person could sue the city, even though the city did nothing wrong.”

Those in favor of the fines, however, said that enforcement against an individual may deter people one-by-one, but that punishing agencies is a model that has already proven effective at the highest levels. One of President Donald Trump’s first actions as he entered his second term was to release an executive order defining male and female and denouncing “gender ideology.” Multiple states including Texas quickly followed with their own legal definitions.

Trump has also sued California for transgender athlete policies, and the Department of Justice has subpoenaed doctors who provide gender-affirming care for minors. Those efforts have created a chilling effect on trans care across the nation, opponents claim, but supporters have pointed to the Trump administration’s actions as a model for enforcement.

“This is the way that the Trump administration is enforcing this, by suing entire states,” Schilling said. “These are the ways that you actually get buy-in from the system that’s been corrupted.”

The efforts from the White House is a stark shift from the Biden administration, which attempted to expand Title IX discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ students that conservative lawmakers saw as an unlawful overstep.

As the penalties and scope of subsequent bathroom bills have widened, so, too, has their support. Nineteen other states have passed some form of bathroom bill as Texas lawmakers have wrestled with their own, including two states that have created criminal penalties. Public sentiment has also shifted toward more restrictions, as 49% of Americans support legal requirements to use bathrooms that match someone’s gender assigned at birth, according to the Pew Research Center.

Despite public apprehension that allowing trans people in bathrooms creates dangerous situations for women, no statistical evidence is available to prove danger increases whenever trans people are able to use restrooms according to their gender identity. Allowing trans people to use bathrooms and other facilities matching their identifying gender does not cause an increase in assaults, according to a 2018 study from the Williams Institute.

Malone said growing animosity toward trans people is fueled because of legislation like bathroom bills, which portray the community as an imminent harm to people who likely don’t know a trans person. About 11% of people in the U.S. personally know someone who is transgender, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.

“They start to have a slight negative opinion because of simply, well, if all these states are outlawing these laws, there clearly has to be some rhyme or reason, and there really isn’t,” Malone said. “The negative opinions and the negative legislation around it is sort of seeping into that movable middle, and that’s what’s really dangerous.”

House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, indicated in the closing days of the first special session that “protecting women’s spaces” would be a priority for the lower chamber during the second special session. A majority of the House’s representatives signed on as coauthors to the House versions of the proposal during the regular and first special session.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/20/texas-legislature-transgender-bathroom-bill-history/.

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The post Texas bills restricting trans people have evolved since 2015 appeared first on feeds.texastribune.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This content presents a detailed overview of Texas legislation targeting transgender rights, emphasizing the challenges faced by the trans community and highlighting opposition to restrictive bills. It includes perspectives from transgender advocates and civil liberties groups, while also providing context on conservative lawmakers’ positions. The framing tends to be sympathetic to transgender individuals and critical of restrictive legislation, reflecting a center-left viewpoint that supports LGBTQ+ rights and is cautious about conservative policy efforts in this area.

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In his East Texas hometown, James Beathard was known as an unconventional thinker—an outspoken peacenik who marched in the high school band and sometimes played chess during lunch breaks. His student body was unapologetically pro-2nd Amendment and, in those pre-mass shooting days, the parking lot in Rusk held plenty of pickups with gun racks full of loaded shotguns and hunting rifles.

So Beathard, whose high school years in the 1970s overlapped with the Vietnam War, shocked his entire lunch table during a raucous debate one day by “coming out as a conscientious objector,” recalled his friend Lucy Murphy. “He really felt he could not … use a gun against anybody. So there was really no sense in him going to the military. And yet his father had been in the military, and my dad was a career military person.”

After graduation, Beathard attended college and then took a job at his hometown’s largest employer: the state mental hospital. In 1984, his biggest problem seemed to be that he’d recently gotten divorced and needed money for a lawyer in order to win more visits with his kids, Murphy said.

So it confounded his fellow residents of Rusk when Beathard was arrested for capital murder—along with a coworker—in connection with a heinous crime that left three people dead in a remote cabin in the Davy Crockett National Forest 50 miles south. Beathard had no prior criminal record.

Fewer seemed surprised about the arrest of Gene Hathorn Jr., the co-defendant, who was a local drug dealer with a history of violence and clear motive. The victims were Hathorn’s father, who’d recently disinherited him, his stepmother, and half-brother. Some locals later testified to threats he’d made against his family and his violent temper: In one instance, he’d used nunchucks to brutalize a man simply for taking a drink of whiskey without asking him. The Trinity County district attorney sought the death penalty for both men.

Beathard’s case went to trial first, and Hathorn testified for the prosecution, claiming his friend planned and carried out the killings. Beathard then denied knowing anything about Hathorn’s murder plot; he testified he’d been tricked into riding to the family home and claimed he’d fled and hidden when Hathorn opened fire. But Beathard was sentenced to death.

A few weeks later, Hathorn recanted, saying he’d concocted false testimony only after being threatened and promised leniency. “I freely admit that I caused the death of all of the decedents by shooting them with guns. I did this without the aid of James L. Beathard. None of the testimony … was in fact true,” he said in an affidavit.

The new version of events made no difference: Beathard, who claimed innocence, was executed in 1999; Hathorn had his death sentence commuted to life.

That’s a portion of this twisted Texas tale that two recent graduates of an English law school—Amelia Nice, originally from Humble, and Gurvin Chopra, who visited Texas for the first time to investigate this case—hope to tell in a new documentary along with Christian Roper, an East Texas filmmaker whose family members knew Beathard. The trio call their film-in-progress, Shadow of a Doubt: The James Beathard Story, and have raised more than $15,000 for the The Beathard Project through a grant and Kickstarter.

Nearly 25 years after his execution, Beathard’s story remains largely untold. In January 2000, the Texas Observer published one of the only articles about his innocence claim. In “A Letter From Hell,” editor Michael King posed the question of why Texas was killing Beathard despite “considerable evidence that Beathard was not guilty.” 

In that era, Governor George W. Bush was running for president on a tough-on-crime platform. Texas executed 152 people during his tenure in the governor’s mansion.

Moments before death, Beathard thanked the Observer and condemned the system that was about to kill him: “I’m dying tonight based on testimony, that all parties, me, the man who gave the testimony, the prosecutor he used knew it was a lie.”

His haunting last words were part of what drew the attention of those students at the undergraduate law school in Bristol, England, decades later. Nice and Chopra learned of Beathard’s story from attorney Clive Stafford Smith, a legendary defense and human rights attorney, who recruited them for the Postmortem Project, a multi-year effort to scrutinize cases where Americans used their last words to proclaim innocence before being executed.

Many cases examined in the project involve Texas, which has both condemned and executed more people than any other state. Since 1976, when U.S. executions resumed after a four-year moratorium prompted by a federal Supreme Court ruling, Texas has killed 595 people, according to the Death Penalty Information Center’s execution database. The center separately tallies 18 people from Texas death row who were exonerated and released after flawed forensic evidence, perjury, or other flaws were exposed. 

The same group’s Innocence Database includes Kerry Max Cook, another East Texas man who was wrongfully convicted of a murder in Tyler. In a 2001 back-and-forth with state lawmakers, Cook, who knew Beathard, cited the latter as a clear case of a wrongful execution: “Mr. Beathard, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, was innocent.” Cook was recently declared actually innocent and has sued Smith County officials who allegedly framed him.

There are several other infamous Texas executions involving innocence claims. These include Cameron Todd Willingham, a father from Corsicana whose three small children died in a Christmas-time house fire that seasoned forensic experts later said was sparked by an electrical problem rather than the arson that the state’s expert witnesses had described based on discredited techniques. 

Carlos DeLuna, of Corpus Christi, was the subject of a Columbia University investigation (and subsequent book) and a Chicago Times series and was executed despite evidence that an eyewitness confused DeLuna with the true killer, another man named Carlos. And Ruben Cantu, a Southside San Antonio youth was executed for a robbery-murder he allegedly committed at age 17—though Cantu’s co-defendent and the lone eyewitness later said that Cantu was never at the scene and detectives targeted Cantu after he’d been in a bar fight involving an off-duty officer.

In an interview with the Observer, Stafford Smith argued that Texas likely has many more cases involving executed innocent people whose stories received far less publicity than Willingham, Cantu, and DeLuna.

Beathard saw all of his appeals denied. Texas courts rejected his innocence claim as too late, since Hathorn’s recantation came 90 days after his trial and Rule 21 of the Texas Rules of Appellate Procedure “barred the introduction of new evidence as grounds for a new trial more than 30 days after sentencing,” Nice explained in an email. “This quirk of procedural law” combined with a legal doctrine that rejects new evidence of innocence as grounds for relief by itself, she added, “led to an instance where a man was executed on evidence that was essentially nonexistent at the time of his execution.”

Given Texas’ history of largely pro-death penalty court rulings, it’s somewhat astonishing that Hathorn, nearly five years after Beathard’s death, won his own appeal in the same murder case. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his death sentence based on arguments that evidence of abuse he’d suffered as a child from his father, the principal target of his killing spree, had never been presented as a potentially mitigating factor during the punishment phase of his capital murder trial.

In 2004, Hathorn’s attorney negotiated a plea deal, and Hathorn was resentenced to life. In an interview with the Observer, David Sergi, Hathorn’s appellate attorney, told the Observer that he recalls a judge requested the court hearing be held early in the morning to avoid drawing a potentially angry crowd.

One of the few news stories available on the internet about the resentencing does not mention that Beathard had already been executed for the crime, despite an innocence claim. (More than a decade later, Hathorn died of natural causes.)

Joe Price, the Trinity County DA who sought death sentences for Beathard and Hathorn, made different arguments in their two trials. He initially used Hathorn’s testimony to convict Beathard and to argue for a death sentence, saying: “Hathorn might be a cold-blooded killer, but there hasn’t been any evidence in this courtroom that says he is a liar. He is telling the truth.”

Then, in Hathorn’s trial, Price attacked Hathorn’s testimony against Beathard as unbelievable. It could not have convinced a “one-eyed hunting dog,” he said.

Price died in a car accident in 2003. Despite Hathorn’s recantation, William Lee Hon, the retired Polk County prosecutor and Price’s close friend, told the Observer Price never expressed doubts about Beathard’s execution given that under Texas’ so-called law of parties others involved in a crime can sometimes be held responsible for the actions of the mastermind or the triggerman. “I don’t think there was any doubt in Joe’s mind, at least based on my discussions with him,” Hon said.

Still, some people in Rusk ask themselves how it was that the gunman ended up getting off death row and the innocent onlooker was executed. Roper, the documentary filmmaker on the Beathard project, grew up in Rusk, and he said plenty of locals consider Beathard’s execution to have been unjust. Among them is his Aunt Lucy.

Lucy Murphy was one of Beathard’s close friends and lunchroom pals growing up. Her father employed him at the state mental hospital. She was sitting with him the day he declared as a teen that he could never use a gun against another man. She thinks Texas executed an innocent man, someone guilty mainly of trusting the wrong person. “At the beginning, when he was convicted of this, I thought he didn’t do it. There’s no way he could have done this. He did not shoot anybody,” Murphy told the Observer.

Murphy remembers Beathard telling her: “This guy took me off in the middle of nowhere to his parents’ house. And he killed his family. Oh, I waited outside, not knowing what the fuck was going on. I figured it out pretty quick, he said some things in the past, but it was too late.” Afterward, he told her, Hathorn repeatedly threatened to kill his family if he didn’t cover for Hathorn.

“What would you do?” Murphy asked. “You just, you protect the people you love. And I think that’s why he made some bad choices and got some bad advice. But he didn’t shoot anybody.”

The post The Innocent and the Executed: James Beathard’s Long-Forgotten Story appeared first on www.texasobserver.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This content critiques the Texas criminal justice system, particularly its use of the death penalty, highlighting cases of potential wrongful executions and systemic flaws. The focus on innocence claims, procedural barriers to justice, and the human cost of capital punishment aligns with concerns often emphasized by center-left perspectives advocating for criminal justice reform and greater protections for defendants. While it does not overtly politicize the issue, the critical tone toward state authorities and the death penalty suggests a center-left leaning viewpoint.