Tennessee Senate approves ban on gender marker changes on official docs, despite funding loss risk

Tennessee senators on Monday voted in favor of proposed legislation to define male and female in state law — running the risk of losing billions in federal education funding.

The measure, Senate Bill 1440, would define sex in state law to mean a person’s sex assigned at birth, which the proposed legislation says is “immutable.” Tennesseans under the proposed bill, introduced in February by state Sen. Kerry Roberts (R), would be made to carry government-issued identification documents that reflect the sex that is listed on their original birth certificate.

Under current state law, transgender people in Tennessee may change their gender marker on identity documents, including their state-issued driver’s license, if they are able to provide proof of gender-affirming surgery or a court order.

Tennessee law does not allow individuals born in the state to amend their birth certificate to accurately reflect their gender identity.

Roberts’s bill passed the state Senate Monday on a 27-6 vote along party lines. It now heads to the Republican-controlled House for consideration.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican who earlier this month signed the nation’s first law restricting drag performances and banned gender-affirming health care for minors, has not yet signaled whether he supports the legislation.

Enacting the proposed law could have significant financial consequences for Tennessee, according to the legislation’s fiscal review, and the state risks losing more than $1.2 billion in federal education funding by enforcing the measure because it conflicts with federal nondiscrimination rules.

More than $750 million in federal grants may also be withheld, and funding for state and local government, including Tennessee’s education and health departments, may be jeopardized.

Enforcing the bill as it currently reads may also increase state and local spending associated with compliance measures and could result in civil litigation, according to the measure’s fiscal review.

Roberts has said his bill “doesn’t have anything to do with transgender” people or the broader LGBTQ community.

“I mean, if defining sex, as it has traditionally meant for years in the dictionary, costs us federal funds, there’s something wrong with Washington, D.C.,” Roberts said Monday, according to Nashville-based WKRN.

“It’s not a novel definition. It’s not a new definition,” Roberts argued on the Senate floor. “We’re not doing anything different for us to define terms when we need to in the code.”

State Democrats and other members of the LGBTQ community on Monday argued the bill would have a disproportionate negative impact on transgender and intersex people by defining sex in a way that prevents them from being covered by state nondiscrimination laws.

“Let’s be clear: the goal of this bill is to exclude the LGBTQ+ community from nondiscrimination protections in the state of Tennessee and to perpetuate a false narrative of who transgender people are,” Sarah Warbelow, the legal director of the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, said Monday in a statement.

Tennessee Sen. Jeff Yarbo, one of just six Democrats in the state Senate, said Roberts’s bill offered a solution to a nonexistent problem.

“I don’t know why on earth we would take the risk of losing $2 billion of annual federal funding in order to provide a definition that nobody really thinks needs fixing,” he said on the Senate floor.