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Former Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis speaks at the Texas Women Are Stronger Together! rally organized by Equality Texas, July 2025
"Leave our bodies alone," former state Sen. Wendy Davis said.
The summer sun had barely cleared the dome of the Texas Capitol when former state Sen. Wendy Davis, a Democrat, took the podium Wednesday morning. Framed by the stone columns of the building where she once filibustered for abortion rights in pink sneakers, gaining national attention in 2013, Davis stood before a crowd of women, survivors, LGBTQ+ advocates, union organizers, and faith leaders, all gathered to reject a new front in Texas’s ongoing culture war: House Bill 32.
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The bill, filed July 14 by Republican state Rep. Valoree Swanson and titled the Texas Women’s Privacy Act, would ban transgender people from using restrooms and other sex-segregated public facilities aligned with their gender identity in government buildings, public schools, domestic violence shelters, and prisons. It defines “biological sex” through chromosomes, anatomy, and the designation on a person’s unamended birth certificate. And it goes further: authorizing civil penalties up to $25,000, inviting lawsuits, and attempting to block Texas courts from even hearing constitutional challenges.
“This bathroom bill is so typical of what we see coming from the legislature when the heat is on them for their own misdeeds,” Davis said. “What they want is to divert our attention elsewhere.”
She added, “I can tell you as a woman that we should be doing everything we can to solve the real problems of this state. We should be standing together and saying, leave our bodies alone. Let us pee in peace.”
She continued, “Let us travel the streets of this state without fear that we are going to be stopped because we may be seeking reproductive health care. Let us have autonomy over our bodies once again. Quite simply, leave us alone and do your job to make sure that we truly are safe.”
Though Republican Gov. Greg Abbott called a special legislative session to address devastating July 4 floods that killed at least 135 Texans, HB 32 was among the first 82 bills filed, and none mentioned disaster relief. Instead, the bathroom ban swiftly became the session’s ideological centerpiece.
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According to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that tracks LGBTQ+ policy, 26 percent of transgender people in the United States now live in states where it is illegal for them to use bathrooms and facilities aligned with their gender identity in at least some public settings. Texas is now poised to join the six states with the broadest such bans, where all government-owned facilities are covered.
For those gathered on the Capitol’s south steps, the cruelty of the legislation was self-evident. Its pretense, protecting women’s safety, was not only offensive, they argued, but dangerous. Time and again, the rally’s speakers called out the hypocrisy of invoking women’s bodies to harm another vulnerable group.
Rep. Jessica González, chair of the Texas House LGBTQ Caucus, delivered a blistering indictment. “We’re done watching our trans community be attacked by politicians who wouldn’t last five minutes walking in their shoes,” she said. “We’re done being used as political scapegoats for political gain.”
To González, HB 32 wasn’t about policy or public safety; it was about power. “They want us to hide. They want us to disappear. But we’ve got news for them: we aren’t going anywhere.”
State Sen. Molly Cook, an emergency room nurse and the first openly LGBTQ+ person elected to the Texas Senate, tied her opposition to her professional oath. “This bathroom bill will not make anyone safer,” she said. “As a nurse, I care deeply about creating safe spaces for everyone. But when Republicans claim that they’re protecting women by banning trans people from public restrooms, they’re exploiting survivors.”
Cook said she confronted the Senate sponsor of a similar bill earlier this year and received “no answer at all for why we need this bill. He stumbled over his words... and couldn’t even define sex or gender.”
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Her message was clinical and unflinching. “This is not based in data,” she said. “It is based in hate and it is based in cruelty.”
From the labor movement, Ana Gonzalez of the Texas AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions, emphasized collective strength. “Do we really want the government policing who walks into a restroom?” she asked. “That’s not only invasive, it’s absurd and it’s dangerous.”
Kimiya Factory, a queer Afro-Latina organizer and founder of Black Freedom Factory, placed the moment in a broader historical lineage of legislative harm. “My rights are being stripped away from me, not by trans women in the bathroom stalls ... but in violent House sessions ... by white cisgender lawmakers,” she said. “It is time for us to stand in our privilege the way that trans folks have stood for us for centuries.”
Fiona Dawson, a domestic violence survivor and LGBTQ+ advocate, spoke from lived experience. “You’ll hear time and time again that there are zero instances of transgender people attacking anyone in a public restroom,” she said. “Meanwhile, violence against women happens at three times the rate in their own home.”
Dawson added, “The real bathroom bill we need is one that protects us from folks who don’t wash their hands.”
Melodía Gutierrez, the Texas state director for the Human Rights Campaign, reminded the crowd that for many, the violence isn’t theoretical. “Let me be very clear: I would not feel safe in a men’s restroom, and neither would my transgender sisters like Laverne Cox or Hunter Schafer,” she said. “That’s not safety. That’s cruelty disguised as policy.”
She framed the bill as a test of values. “When transgender women are under attack, we all are under attack,” she said. “We are safer when we build a world that includes all women.”
Darcy Caballero of Planned Parenthood Texas Votes closed the rally with sharp clarity. “I am not afraid to share space with a trans person,” she said. “I’m afraid of politicians who use fear and lies to divide us, distract us, and endanger our neighbors.”
She punctuated the moment with a declaration aimed squarely at the Capitol behind her: “You know who doesn’t belong in our bathrooms? The state of Texas.”
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