Montana Republicans Want to Legally Define Sex by Reproductive Capacity
The Montana state legislature is considering a bill that would redefine sex based on reproductive capacity, in a move that some experts say would gut state-level non-discrimination statutes and effectively define trans, nonbinary and intersex people out of the law. If the bill is enacted into law, advocates worry that the first-of-its-kind legislation could be copied by anti-trans lawmakers in states around the country.
Introduced by State Senator Carl Glimm, Senate Bill 458 would revise the definitions of “female” and “male” in the Montana Code to be solely based on whether or not an individual produces eggs or sperm.
In a phone interview with Them, Shawn Reagor, the director of equality at the Montana Human Rights Network, said that the bill could impact “everything from identifying documents, and how incoming students might need to register for classes, and how they might need to identify themselves in a school program, to really changing the court’s interpretation of non-discrimination law.”
Similar bills have been introduced in state legislatures around the country, but have failed. Logan Casey, a senior policy researcher and adviser for the LGBTQ+ legislative tracking organization Movement Advancement Project, told PBS that at least 15 bills that aim to redefine sex have been introduced thus far this year across 11 states. SB 458, however, has passed the House, and is set to be heard in the Senate, where there is a Republican supermajority. The bill, Reagor told Them, “is the broadest of anything that we have seen in the country.”
“Completely narrowing down the complex system of gender and sex and identity into a person's reproductive capacity is extremely concerning and extremely damaging,” Reagor added.
Advocates also questioned the bill’s enforceability. Quinn Leighton, the director of external affairs at Planned Parenthood Advocates of Montana, has tried to press lawmakers on this point, asking, “Are you going to do pelvic exams or genetic testing? How do you foresee making sure that people are using the identifications that match their gender, or in their own words, sex?”
While SB 458 is clearly targeted to discriminate against trans and intersex people, advocates and legal experts have pointed out that redefining sex discrimination law could potentially impact wide swaths of people, including cisgender women. Ria Tabacco Mar, the director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, stated that the bill “shares a throughline with the long and ugly history of gender-based subjugation in the name of biology.”