In classic Magnolia State fashion, legislation that discriminates against minority communities has recently gained traction in the legislature.
Four Mississippi bills that target the LGBTQ community have progressed forward during this legislation and, in turn, garnered controversy.
House Bill 1607, self-righteously named the Women’s Bill of Rights, looks to provide specific definitions for terms like man, woman, mother, father, etc. Many of these descriptions are written in ways that conflate sex with gender, excluding transitioning or gender-fluid individuals. For example, the bill defines “man” as, “an adult human of the male sex.”
The bill goes further right by outright defining “sex:”
“‘Sex’ means a person’s biological sex, either male or female, as observed or clinically verified at birth. ‘Sex’ is objective and fixed: there are only two (2) sexes, and every individual is either male or female. ‘Sex’ does not include gender identity or other terms intended to convey a person’s subjective sense of self. ‘Gender identity’ and other such subjective terms may not be used as synonyms or substitutes for ‘sex.’”
The last sentence in particular would be celebrated by the Westboro Baptist Church.
The deliberate attempt to legally invalidate gender non-conforming individuals’ identity is authoritarian and harms a percentage of the population which has been consistently growing over the past decade. What’s more, the bill does not write out legal penalties for those who behave in manners which might violate or contradict the framework provided, meaning that the laws could be broadly interpreted to punish queer individuals.
Perhaps most ironic of all, the so-called Women’s Bill of Rights does not lay out a single right for any of the individuals defined within. This greatly limits the volatility of such legislation, which is a good thing. Keep in mind Mississippi was home to the Goon Squad, a group of Rankin County police officers who tortured individuals in place of doing simple investigative tasks. Imagine the dystopia the state would come to be if lawmakers were given the liberty to assign punishments for having a non-traditional gender or sexual identity.
Well, legislators hold exactly that power. They chose to not load the bill with legal penalties, though.
So, if the bill goes as far to explicitly define the experience of gender and sex for millions of individuals in the state but does nothing to enforce the observation of these definitions, what is the purpose of writing and passing such legislation?
To give lawmakers the benefit of the doubt, there is potential that the bill could serve as a reference point in court cases. Republican Rep. Joey Hood argues that this bill is a document meant to ensure consistency and protection of women.
Interestingly, Rep. Hood inadvertently gave the public some insight to how harmful this bill could be in regard to gender non-conforming individuals: “Now, if someone wants to identify as something else, that’s not going to give them the effect under the statute. We’re just saying under the state of Mississippi and the law, this body right here, we’re saying if a statute or anything says male, female, woman, boy, that means the sex that you’re born with.”
If this was the intended purpose of the bill, lawmakers would leave interpretation and implementation to local governments, which would perhaps be a more grave sentence for queer people across the state.
I can only picture the resources that will hypothetically be invested in the bathroom police. I wish I could unimagine the hypothetical, lewd stop-and-frisk necessary to determine the sex of bathroom-goers. I digress.
The fact that this bill lacks a backbone could be a good thing. It could mean less opportunity for things to go south. Still, it also leaves the backdoor open for adverse interpretation. Furthermore, this is one of the most egregious instances of legislators engaging in image politics. House-Bill 1607 passed through the chamber on a 82-30 vote, with all of the disagreeing votes coming from the Democratic party.
The Republican party mindlessly pushed this bill through in order to flex their reactionary muscles once again. In what has quickly become a stale, tasteless way to display political ideology, image politics pollute what has otherwise been a relatively progressive legislation session.
Justice Rose is the opinion editor. He is a junior journalism major from Madison, Miss.
