In The 19th

In Austin, attorney Meghan Alexander used to receive maybe three calls a week about second-parent adoptions. The week after the election, she received 26. The calls and emails haven’t stopped.

“The advice is the same as it’s been for the last couple of decades, which is to do a second-parent adoption. Do not depend on the federal government or the gay right to marry to give you parental rights,” Alexander said.

Alexander recommends to her clients that parents get an adoption instead of a parentage order because in Texas, for example, parentage orders for LGBTQ+ families have not been thoroughly challenged in the court system, Alexander said, while adoptions have been upheld by the courts many times.

Adoptions are a popular option because they are also more commonly understood and “universally recognized” across states and countries, said Nancy Polikoff, professor emerita at American University Washington College of Law and an expert in LGBTQ+ family law. Still, it ultimately will depend on state laws and the parents’ preferences as to which avenue they pursue.

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“When we are looking at the possibility of cutting back on LGBT family recognition, states that are not inclined to recognize the legitimacy of parenting by LGBT people are going to be emboldened to deny that status whenever they can,” she said.

Polikoff said she does not believe that gay marriage will be overturned in the next four years, but what may be more likely to happen is that states and courts will try to cut back on some protections LGBTQ+ people have recently secured. Parenting relationships could become easy prey. 

It's intentionally the opposite of public safety. It's giving violent bigots carte blanche to assault any woman who doesn't meet their expectations of femininity. It's not designed to "work"; it's designed to sow chaos and fear.

These state bathroom bans provide few, if any details about how they would be enforced because they don’t need to — private citizens are often meant to be the enforcers, said Logan Casey, director of policy research at the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit that tracks LGBTQ+ legislation.

“The way that the laws are de facto enforced is often through the emboldening of private individuals to police other people’s bathroom use,” he said. “There’s no written enforcement because the proponents of these bills know that just by talking about this, let alone enacting these laws, that they are emboldening individual people themselves to enforce these bathroom bans.”

A recent example that takes this formula to an extreme can be seen in Odessa, Texas. A new expansion of the West Texas town’s ordinance allows individual citizens to sue transgender people caught using bathrooms that match their gender identity and seek “no less than $10,000 in damages,” per the Texas Tribune.

Deputizing private citizens to enforce this kind of law enables high rates of harassment and violence against transgender people as well as cisgender people, Casey said, particularly women who do not conform to traditional ideas of femininity.