Senate Revives Bathroom Bill that Bombed
in House Where Reboot May See Same Fate
Capitol Inside
May 19, 2025
After touting a bathroom security measure as a paramount priority in regular and special session in 2017, Texas Senate Republicans have taken a more subtle approach eight years later with a resurrected version of the legislation that's been stuck in a House committee for nearly a month.
The bathroom restrictions plan for 2025 cleared the upper chamber in Senate Bill 240 on April 24 on a 20-10 vote that unfolded exclusively along party lines.
SB 240 landed four days later in the State Affairs Committee in the House where it's been parked ever since.
The contemporary bathroom bill number is an indication that Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick no longer sees it as a pressing concern like he did eight years ago when he conceived the proposal in a bid to make Texas the second state with a policy designed to keep transgender females out of public restrooms designated for women. The original Texas bathroom bill was Patrick's sixth highest-ranking priority in the 2017 regular session before he deemed it as the third most important proposal that lawmakers would tackle in a special summer session that year.
With Republican Joe Straus at the helm across the rotunda in a fifth term as speaker in 2017, the bathroom bill was dead on arrival in the House where it never received a committee assignment much less a vote on the lower chamber floor in the regular session or the subsequent special gathering that year. The measure represented what may be Patrick's biggest singular failure in more than 10 years as the Senate's presiding officer.
While the relatively high bill number is ostensibly a sign that Patrick and the Senate Republicans aren't as afraid of men lurking in the shadows of women restrooms decked in female attire, GOP State Senator Mayes Middleton of Galveston made SB 240 even stronger as the lead author for the reboot.
SB 240 would prohibit public schools and other facilities that state government controls from adopting policies that fail to restrict the use of restrooms, locker rooms and showers on their premises based on biological sex at birth. State agencies, schools and other public entities that ran afoul of the proposed law could be subject to civil penalties up to $5,000 for the first offense and $25,000 for every subsequent violation under the terms of SB 240.
The fines under Senate Bill 6 in 2017 would have ranged from $1,000 to $5,000 for an initial violation before vaulting to $10,500 for every subsequent offense. That would have been more like a slap on the wrist compared to civil penalties that could be five times higher in the version that Middleton pushing in the current session. Any Texas resident would have the ability to file complaints on public schools, state agencies and other entities failing to adhere to the new regulations that SB 240 proposes.
Patrick and his GOP allies in the Capitol's east wing have taken another page from their playbook from 2017 with the christening of SB 240 as the Texas Women's Privacy Act. The Senate Republicans sought to portray the 2017 bathroom bill as a measure that was necessary to protect the privacy and safety of women and girls when they relieve themselves in places outside their homes.
That line of reasoning raised eyebrows in light of the fact that Texas has never had any problems that the bathroom bills aim to cure. So SB 240 - like the 2017 model - appears to be a proactive attempt to prevent troubles that the Senate Republicans apparently envision with the bathroom bill's revival.
The closest thing that the bill's advocates could find for an example that their concerns are real may have been a Senate committee hearing witness who's a Texas native who played on the San Jose State University volleyball team last year with a transgender teammate.
“I had the choice to make myself comfortable in a women's only locker room taken away from me because they again chose to prioritize the safety and wants of a man over female athlete,” the college volleyball player Brooke Slusser told the Senate State Affairs Committee in the hearing on SB 240 last month.
Slusser praised Texas lawmakers for passing a ban on competition between members of opposite biological sexes in high school and college athletics. But it wasn't clear why she chose to participate in sports a public university in California - the nation's largest blue state where there is no such prohibition.
more to come ...
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