Editor’s note: This updated story originally ran on April 6, 2023.
(CNN) — At least 510 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced in state legislatures across the United States last year—a new record, according to American Civil Liberties Union data as of December 21. That’s nearly three times the number of such bills introduced in 2022.
Education and health care-related bills, in particular, flooded in at unprecedented levels. Along with a renewed push to ban access to gender-affirming health care for transgender youth, there was a heavy focus on regulating curriculum in public schools, including discussions around gender identity and sexuality.
Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned gender at birth to their affirmed gender — the gender by which a person wants to be known.
New bills were filed nearly every day and the landscape is changing quickly. “A bill that got introduced yesterday is almost old news,” said Kat Carrick, a professor at the George Washington University LGBT Health Policy and Practice Program in an April interview with CNN.
By the end of the year, 84 bills were signed into law in 23 states. That’s 16% of the total number of bills filed across the country in 2023. Tennessee and North Dakota tied for the most number of anti-LGBTQ bills passed, with 10 each.
More than a dozen of the bills passed last year are being challenged in court, according to the ACLU.
“We have seen the scope and scale of these attacks increase over the last few years, starting around 2020-2021,” Gillian Branstetter, communications strategist for the ACLU, told CNN in April. “It’s not just the total number that has gotten worse, but the extremity of the bills.”
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