Laws and executive orders like those in Florida are rapidly being introduced in all states as the midterm elections approach. Texas Governor Greg Abbott (right) recently issued an executive order that defines the provision of gender-affirming medical care as child abuse requiring state intervention by child protective services . (A judge blocked the execution while lawsuits challenging the order are pending.)

Just two years ago, states were also busy with legislation targeting transgender, gender non-conforming and lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. Is there anything different in this year’s bills, or are they more the same?

My forthcoming research reveals that proponents of these bills are exploiting a general lack of knowledge about transgender people to portray them as threats to girls and women, and using it to advance agendas that ensure standards of racialized gender promoting white families headed by a man and a woman. .

New bills are introduced or passed every day attacking transgender youth

Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and Texas executive order add to other recently passed laws that target a vulnerable minority, banning transgender girls from playing sports and banning transgender youth from accessing Health care.

Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds recently signed into law a law completely banning transgender women and girls from participating in high school and college sports, which advocates say preserves fairness in the women’s and women’s athletics.

And Idaho House just passed a law that would criminalize providing gender-affirming care to transgender people under the age of 18.

These are conflicting goals: on the one hand, claiming to protect non-trans girls in sport; on the other hand, preventing transgender youth from accessing what the American Academy of Pediatrics considers life-saving health care. Instead of protecting young people, proponents of these bills aim to exploit what political scientists see as a general lack of knowledge about transgender people to raise fears of a threat to the dominant gendered social order. They accomplish this by claiming that they protect vulnerable women and girls and, in turn, preserve “traditional family values” as well as the heterosexual-led nuclear family unit.

Feminist scholars and queer theorists like M. Jacqui Alexander argue that political actors criminalize and stigmatize non-normative sexuality and gender to build a nation that promotes reproductive white citizens at the expense of all others. These sexual and gender norms therefore support white supremacy. For example, defining white femininity as weak, nurturing, and in need of protection by white men may imply that capable, straight, white men are those most deserving of rights.

Perceptions of childhood innocence deployed to conceal the discriminatory impact of laws

As with earlier “toilet bills,” those promoting this wave of bans portray white girls and women as particularly vulnerable and in need of protection. These are familiar tactics. Historian Robin Bernstein’s 2011 book, “Racial Innocence,” traced how political figures have used white to represent childhood innocence and vulnerability that must be protected from various threats. In this way, they can promote political agendas as self-evident and natural, such as keeping transgender youth out of social and athletic spaces.

These constructions of childhood innocence as implicitly white and feminine are buttressed by contrasting myths about black boys as inherently violent. Sociologist Ann Arnett Ferguson’s research into public school systems shows how black youth, especially black boys, are disproportionately punished, reinforcing the image of black masculinity as inherently threatening.

If white girls are innocent, especially vulnerable, and in need of protection from implicit and explicit racist threats embodied by black boys, then they are especially in need of protection from – in the latest version – black trans girls. Proponents of banning transgender athletes regularly mention (and consistently confuse) Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, arguing that they are dangerous to women’s sports, as my upcoming research examines in more detail.

A significant number of comments on the YouTube videos of the two high school track runners justify excluding Yearwood and Miller from the competition by arguing that they are biologically male and therefore possess an “unfair biological advantage”. They then compare Yearwood and Miller to elite athletes such as Mike Tyson. For example, a representative comment satirically states, “Latest news: Mike Tyson is out as a woman. Now he is participating in a women’s boxing tournament. Me: wow what a massacre.

Repeated references to Tyson, with his heavy history of violence against women, draw on age-old and dangerous stereotypes that black boys and men are inherently violent and white girls and women are perpetual victims to affirm that two black trans girls shouldn’t compete on their track team. These myths about black masculinity and the vulnerability of white women attribute what Lisa Marie Cacho calls the “presumption of white innocence” to all non-transgender white female athletes. Politicians and other advocates of these bans argue as if all other female athletes are hurt by transgender athletes — even when no transgender athletes are on their teams or opposing teams. Given the implicit racial construct of opposition to transgender athletes, it’s perhaps unsurprising that a photo of Reynolds signing Iowa’s ban on transgender girls playing sports shows her surrounded by girls and white women.

These bills seek to erase transgender, gay, lesbian and bisexual people, and exploit the midterm elections as an opportunity to invite voters to weigh in on their existence. They also promote harmful racial and gender stereotypes about who, exactly, constitutes a real girl and which boys are seen as threats.

Zein Mourib (@zeinmurib) is an assistant professor of political science at Fordham University in New York whose work focuses on the politics of sexuality, gender and race.