The Growth of Legislation
Bills tracked per legislative session since 2004. Toggle between bills introduced, laws enacted, and the cumulative count of enacted laws.
What happens to these bills
Most bills never become law. Here is where every tracked bill ends up — enacted, vetoed, failed (died in committee, at sine die, etc.), or still pending.
Anti-Trans Legislation
Bills that specifically target transgender people — identified by the tracker's "targets gender identity" flag plus trans-specific bill types (care bans, sports and bathroom bans, legal-recognition bans, pronoun bans, and similar). The line shows how these bills went from a fringe of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation to its overwhelming majority.
Who anti-LGBTQ+ laws target: gender identity vs sexual orientation
Enacted anti-LGBTQ+ laws by what they target. A law can target both, so the lines overlap rather than sum. The story is the pivot: the marriage-and-orientation era gave way to a wave aimed squarely at gender identity.
What these bills do
The most common bill types among anti-trans legislation in the selected years.
Legislation by Type
Every bill is classified by type — from gender-affirming care bans and sports bans to nondiscrimination protections. Click a bar to see that type's definition and its trend over time.
Legislation by State
The cumulative legal landscape: every law passed (or bill introduced) up to and including the cutoff year. Drag the year slider back to peel away later years, or press Play to watch the map fill in over time. Tap or click any state for its full breakdown.
Bill Explorer
Search and filter every tracked bill.
| Year | State | Bill | Type | Status | Summary |
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About this data & how to read it
The team. Liz Saila, Erin Reed, Allison Chapman, and Alejandra Caraballo. Cite this work as: Saila, L., Chapman, A, Caraballo, A, Reed, E. “LGBTQ+ Legislation Tracking Project.” Legialerts.org. More from the team at legialerts.org →
Source. Every figure here comes from the volunteer-run LGBTQ+ Legislative Tracking project, which records state and federal bills affecting LGBTQ+ people. This page reads that data directly; the badge in the header shows whether it is live from the source spreadsheets or a bundled snapshot, and the timestamp below says when.
What "enacted" means. A bill's outcome (enacted / vetoed / failed / pending) is taken from the tracker's hand-entered status column first (Enacted, Failed, Roll Over, Vetoed) and the automated status only as a fallback. A bill counts as "enacted" only if it itself was signed into law: a companion bill that became law is credited to the version that was actually signed, and a status like "enacting clause stricken" (which means a bill was killed) counts as failed, not enacted. The state map, the per-state drill-down, the Bill Explorer, the per-type tallies and the outcome breakdown all use this same per-bill measure, so they agree; the headline cards and growth chart use the tracker's per-year summary, which matches within rounding.
Modern scope. The map and these counts cover the bill-by-bill tracker, which runs from 2003. The tracker also keeps a separate list of laws reaching back to the 1800s (e.g. 19th-century anti-masquerade laws, mid-20th-century sodomy laws) — those historical, mostly-repealed statutes are in the data but are not added to the modern map so it isn't distorted by long-defunct laws.
Anti-trans classification. A bill is counted as anti-trans when the tracker flags it as targeting gender identity, or when its bill type is inherently trans-specific (gender-affirming care bans, trans sports/bathroom bans, legal-recognition bans, pronoun bans, drag bans, and the like).
Targeting (gender identity vs sexual orientation). A single law can target both, so those series overlap rather than sum, and some laws are flagged as neither.
Caveats. Court-challenge and law-status detail exists for only a minority of laws, so it is not charted. Pre-2003 coverage is sparse. Year attribution follows the legislative session.