The Arkansas House will consider a bill denounced by advocates for transgender Arkansans on Wednesday, the final day of the 2025 legislative session.
Senate Bill 486 would allow Arkansans to sue for damages if they encounter someone in a bathroom, changing room, shelter or correctional facility who does not align with the “designated sex” of the restroom. The bill narrowly passed the House Committee on State Agencies and Governmental Affairs on Tuesday after 15 people spoke against it and no member of the public spoke for it.
“The intention here is to make it so that trans people cannot exist in public,” said Maricella Garcia, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families’ race equity director. “If you cannot use the restroom, you cannot go out in public.”
Garcia was among several people who said that enforcing SB 486 would require policing and making assumptions about people’s bodies and likely lead to frivolous lawsuits costing taxpayer money.
SB 486 is among many bills related to transgender Arkansans that Rep. Mary Bentley, R-Perryville, has sponsored in the past few legislative sessions, including one the Senate passed Tuesday pertaining to gender-affirming healthcare.
Bentley sponsored Act 317 of 2023, which prohibits K-12 students from using bathrooms that do not match their gender assigned at birth and requires schools to have a “reasonable accommodation,” such as a single-occupancy bathroom, for those unable or unwilling to do so.
Similarly, SB 486 states that shelters, correctional facilities and other entities must take “reasonable steps” to comply with the policy; Bentley said signage indicating who is allowed and not allowed in a space would be sufficient, and she said SB 486 is meant to be an extension of Act 317.
Bentley also supported Act 619 of 2023, which initially would have criminalized entering and remaining in bathrooms and locker rooms that do not match an adult’s gender assigned at birth if children are present. After hours of public pushback before the House Judiciary Committee, that legislation was amended to limit potential criminal charges and prosecutions to adults present in those spaces with criminal intent.
The conservative Family Council worked with lawmakers from both political parties to formulate the amendment to Act 619 two years ago. On Tuesday, Family Council attorney Stephanie Nichols said SB 486 would close “loopholes” in the law to more closely regulate who can enter gender-specific bathrooms.
Evelyn Rios Stafford, a Washington County justice of the peace and Arkansas’ first openly transgender elected official, spoke against Act 619 two years ago and against SB 486 Tuesday.
“We had a compromise that worked for everybody,” she said. “…Everybody walked away feeling that that was a bill that everybody can live with, and now I feel like that compromise and that promise is being broken.”
Sexual violence discussion
Nichols and Bentley repeatedly said SB 486 protects women’s and girls’ privacy, the same argument supporters of Act 317 and Act 619 used. Rep. Cindy Crawford, R-Fort Smith, was the House sponsor of Act 619 and said Tuesday that not passing SB 486 “opens the door” to men entering women’s bathrooms to commit sexual violence.
Several opponents of SB 486 said not only that transgender women in bathrooms are not a threat, but also that the bill does nothing to prevent sexual violence or respect survivors.
“[This bill] exploits my trauma to push a political agenda that’s rooted not in facts but in fear,” Brittany Stockton said. “…The idea that predators are pretending to be trans to attack people in bathrooms is a harmful myth.”
Multiple speakers also said transgender people face a higher risk of identity-based violence and harassment than other demographics. Marie Mainard O’Connell, a Presbyterian pastor and mother of a transgender teen, said she fears one day having to conduct a funeral service for a transgender person dead by suicide or targeted violence.
“If I have to perform that service, you’re getting an invitation,” she told the committee.
Crawford said SB 486 is not intended to harm anyone and her “heart hurts” for transgender people who feel targeted.
“Why should we protect this minority, trans people, when we are putting in danger young women and women in bathrooms that are designated for their sex?” Crawford said.
O’Connell responded to Crawford’s statement by reminding the committee that one of Jesus’ parables in the Bible involves a shepherd leaving 99 sheep behind to search for one that was missing.
“Please vote no on this,” O’Connell said. “It’s not good legislation, it’s not good for our community and it’s not good Christian values.”
Rep. Nicole Clowney, D-Fayetteville, said transgender people who no longer physically resemble their gender assigned at birth would be at risk of violence if the law requires them to use the bathroom that does not align with their identity.
Bentley said Clowney was “way out there on a limb” and reiterated the “reasonable steps” portion of SB 486.
“We have two sexes, male and female, no matter how [many] drugs you take or the kind of surgery you have,” Bentley said.
She introduced the bill to the committee Monday, but was asked to pull it down before public comment. House Minority Leader Andrew Collins, D-Little Rock, asked for an analysis of the bill’s fiscal impact, expressing concerns that public buildings would incur significant costs in order to meet the accommodation standards in SB 486.
The fiscal impact statement from the Department of Finance and Administration asserts that SB 486 will not require the expenditure of state funds or “the construction or modification of any state facilities.”
Rios Stafford disputed this and said not all government buildings in Arkansas have single-occupancy restrooms.
“Any county, any city that wants to do the right thing by their citizens is going to have to spend money and is going to have to spend a lot of money, and we know how much retrofitting a building costs, especially if it’s an older building that was grandfathered in before the Americans with Disabilities Act,” Rios Stafford said.
The Arkansas Senate passed SB 486 along party lines April 2.
Senate action on transgender health care
On Tuesday, the Senate sent a bill to the governor’s desk that would broaden the scope of a 2023 law that created civil liability for doctors who provide gender-affirming health care to transgender minors.
The Protecting Minors from Medical Malpractice Act, or Act 274 of 2023, created a 15-year window for adults to sue physicians for “any physical, psychological, emotional, or physiological injury” incurred while the adult received hormone replacement therapy, puberty blockers or gender-affirming surgeries as a minor.
Bentley sponsored both Act 274 and its proposed amendment, House Bill 1916, which would add mental health care providers to the law’s list of medical professionals liable for “gender-affirming intervention.” She has repeatedly said gender-affirming medical care is harmful to minors; physicians who treat transgender children said otherwise during the 2022 trial over a Bentley-sponsored 2021 law that sought to ban this care.
The Senate Judiciary Committee passed HB 1916 Monday night. Bentley told the committee that gender-affirming care consists of “grotesque experiments that stunt and suppress a child’s natural development in service of scientific fantasies.”
All 29 Republican senators voted to send HB 1916 to Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ desk Tuesday while all six Democrats voted against it.
Sen. Clarke Tucker, D-Little Rock, was the only member of the Judiciary Committee to vote against HB 1916 Monday. He said he agreed with public testimony that the bill’s use of the phrase ”gender-affirming intervention” is too broad.
Psychologist Lindsey Thomas said HB 1916 would hold therapists liable for using transgender minors’ preferred names and pronouns as “gender-affirming intervention”; Bentley agreed that the bill would preclude this from happening.
Thomas also said HB 1916 would increase the costs of providers’ medical malpractice insurance and increase wait times for all children to see a therapist in Arkansas.
The bill mentions hormones and puberty blockers, but the six health care professionals that opposed the bill Monday said mental health care providers do not prescribe these medications. Nine more people had signed up to speak against the bill but did not get to speak due to the committee’s time constraints.
“We don’t know if or when an issue of gender dysphoria might show up,” said Garry Teeter, a counselor and a Christian pastor. “We may be working with that child for months or years, and then this comes up in therapy… At that point, it would be detrimental and harmful to the client for the therapist to say, ‘Because of this particular law that’s now being considered, we’re no longer able to provide you the care that we have been providing.’”
In March, members of the House Judiciary Committee, the public and the Arkansas Attorney General’s staff expressed concerns that Bentley’s House Bill 1668 would infringe on the right to freedom of expression. That bill would have created civil liability for any adult who aids a minor’s “social transitioning,” including “changes in clothing, pronouns, hairstyle, and name.”
Bentley promised to amend HB 1668 but withdrew it the day after she filed HB 1916.
