OH: No More Crossdressing in Front of the Kids

There's has been some social media noise about Ohio's new bill that supposedly criminalizes any kind of behavior that conflicts with your "gender at birth." Maybe. Supporters and the bill's actual language say that HB 249 only makes it illegal to act outside your traditional gender role in front of children. Critics argue that the language is so broad it will eventually squelch every day gender expression. 

The bill updates existing Indecent Exposure laws, and in particular adds a definition of "adult cabaret performance" meaning specifically a performance that is "in a location other than an adult cabaret where minors may be present, that is harmful to juveniles or obscene, regardless of whether or not the performance is for consideration..."

That is followed by a list of specific no-nos, including strippers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, and topless dancers. And then, over above the list of ways that naughty ladies can display their private bits, we get this additional example of an adult cabaret performance:

Performers or entertainers who exhibit a gender identity that is different from the performer's or entertainer's biological sex using clothing, makeup, prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts, or other physical markers;

This is nuts. Now, as I read the law, this doesn't make it illegal to simply be a man wearing heavy makeup while walking down the street or holding high federal office. To trigger this law, you have to be a man heavily made up while performing or entertaining (okay, maybe that high federal office example is in jeopardy after all).

Soooo many problems here. Exactly who will be serving in the new Ohio State Bureau of Acceptable Gender Role Markers? Can a lady singer wear pants? How much make-up can a vice-president man wear and still be legal? Can I show a class Some Like it Hot? What determines whether a t-shirt is male- or female-coded? If a male entertainer uses a high-pitched voice in front of a juvenile audience, is that a violation? I mean, as a life-long bass I harbor a little resentment towards tenors, but this seems like bridge too far.

And if these all seem like extreme cases, let me suggest that you ask a high school teacher how many times they have witnessed a hilarious student skit in which high school boys performed and/or danced dressed like girls (perhaps with some balloon "prosthetics"). The answer is, at least for me, "I lost count ages ago." You can argue that this is obviously just harmless youthy high jinks and surely nobody would seriously consider that illegal. The law was just intended to protect youths from the evils of drag queens, and surely nobody would go after the senior football players in the annual homecoming assembly talent show. But we currently have a whole anti-school-outrage-industrial complex, like the (formerly Parents) Defending Education crew whose whole mission is to try to literally make a federal case out of everything they can find in their karen-fed pipeline of Naughty Behavior in public schools. If this bill passes the Senate (the House has already okayed it) I guarantee that sooner or later you will see a story about some public school dragged into court because it allowed the captain of the basketball team to dress up as a cheerleader in front of the whole student body.

The new law would piggyback on the current state obscenity laws, which are an exercise in vagueness.

"Biological sex" is doing heavy lifting here, defined as indicated by "sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex hormones, gonads, and nonambiguous internal and external genitalia present at birth," and deliberately ruling out any individual's psychological or subjective experience, all of which fits an imaginary world in which gender is simple and cut and dried. However, our world is not that world.

This is one of those laws where someone wanted to stop a "problem" that is so minute and undetectable that they decided to just carpet bomb the entire are either because A) they are lousy at writing laws or B) they were happy to get as much collateral damage as possible. Ohio faces many problems these days; none of them are caused by drag queens. 

You can read ACLU Ohio's full response here, or this handy explainer. If you're in Ohio, you might want to get ahold of your Senator and encourage them to spend more time on actual problems. In the meantime, certain elected officials might want to be careful about appearing in the state.