A Democratic member of the Florida House of Representatives kicked off the 2024 congressional season this week with a bill that would essentially end transgender constitutional recognition across the state and require “biological sex” affidavits for all Floridians.
House Bill 1233, filed January 4 by Rep. Dean Black, updates several state standards to ensure that all identifying documents adhere to the assigned sex on a person’s original birth certificate. The bill also requires all drivers’ license or other ID card applicants to sign an affidavit swearing they marked the sex category recorded on their birth certificate, declares “male” and “female” to be the only state-recognized sex categories, changes all instances of “gender” in state law to “sex” instead (unless “a different meaning is plainly required by context”), and mandates that insurance companies cover therapy “affirming the insured’s sex” — i.e., “reparative” or conversion therapy.
Intersex persons are briefly mentioned in HB 1233, but only as individuals “born with a medically verifiable diagnosis of a disorder of sex development” who are to be covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act. This means the bill, if passed, would also effectively remove the concept of an “intersex person” in Florida legislation except as a medical pathology.
As activist and independent journalist Erin Reed observed Thursday in the Los Angeles Blade, Black’s bill would allow the state to obtain information about the “biological sex” of every Floridian and identify whose constitutional gender markers are mismatched. “The affidavits may help the state to compile lists of transgender people with Florida driver’s licenses”, Reed argued, which “could then be used to enforce other anti-trans laws in the state”, similar to the list Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton attempted to assemble in 2022.
Elected in 2022, Black doesn’t have the strongest legislative record on his own. Of Black’s six bills as a second named partner in 2023, only one — a bill expanding state education and training around dementia — passed into law. But while his solo projects have been mostly unremarkable, Black also cosponsored several anti-trans bills that either passed or were replaced by similar, successful Senate versions. One of those bills was SB 1438, the new state law that prohibits alleged “adult entertainment shows” in view of children and which is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit arguing it unfairly targets drag performers. Last year, Black cosponsored both the House version of that bill and HB 1521, a bill mandating that public bathrooms and locker rooms be strictly sex-segregated, which became law in May.
Although the term does not appear anywhere in the text, Black referred to his bill as the “What Is a Woman Act” in a press release obtained by CBS affiliate WJAX. The term was originally used for a similar, but unsuccessful, Alabama bill last year, and became nationally known in 2022 when Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh used it as the title of a controversial anti-trans documentary. “[W]ith the filing of this bill we have answered the defining question of this era, ‘What is a woman?'” Black wrote in his press release.
In a statement posted to social media on Thursday, Equality Florida Public Policy Director Jon Harris Maurer condemned the bill and vowed to resist its passage through the legislature this year.
“This bill is rooted in a dangerous ideology that denies transgender people do or should exist”, Maurer wrote. “It is part of a blatant attempt to drive transgender Floridians and their families from the state, making them political refugees. We’re ready to fight.”
