The history of such violence is long, including the extreme, deadly brutality of the fabled Texas Rangers from the mid-19th century onward, who perpetrated extraordinary lethal violence against Indigenous and Mexican people to establish and maintain settler border lines. In recent years, racist vigilantes have hunted and captured hundreds of undocumented people attempting to cross the border, largely without retribution. The Texas GOP is currently seeking to codify the practice with the recent introduction of a “ vigilante death squads policy.” The proposed legislation would create an official security force, comprised of both police and private citizens, to track down, arrest, and deport undocumented people. Armed far-right groups on the U.S.-Mexico border have been active in brutal border enforcement for over 40 years, with a notable presence since Donald Trump’s presidency. The same reliance on vigilantism has shaped most every aspect of the history of oppression in this country. Underlying this anti-trans, anti-queer panic is the fact that compulsory heterosexuality and gender conformity is so manufactured, so fragile, that it requires heavy policing and enforcement - both by the state and vigilante forces. Like every new anti-LGBTQ+ law, the bounty hunter bill rests on the formulated far-right paranoia around drag performances and trans existence as sites of “ grooming” and sexual predation.
Even technically ineffectual laws have material consequences for public life, like the recently passed anti-drag law in Tennessee, which makes nothing illegal that is not already illegal. The very nature of such base-catering legislation is to chill LGBTQ+ expression and embolden attacks against it. The Texas bill grants the practice a vile authority - and pulls from a long legacy of the government using state-sanctioned vigilantism to enforce white supremacy, gender conformity, and border rule. Successful plaintiffs could receive as much as $5,000 in “damages,” up to 10 years after the event.Īcross the country, even in New York City, far-right militias and other armed fascists have already made a habit of threatening family-friendly drag performances and story hours. The drag bounty bill likewise encourages citizens to sue anyone who hosts or performs in a drag performance in the presence of a minor - with the added allure of a monetary reward.
Now, Texas Republicans are seeking to use the same legal mechanism in their all-out assault on gender variance. Since its passing, copycat laws have abounded, given the legislation’s ability to evade federal court challenges by relying on civil lawsuits. The abortion law deputized private citizens to sue anyone suspected of helping a person obtain an abortion, with the promise of a $10,000 reward for successful cases. When Texas lawmakers passed Senate Bill 8 in 2021, effectively banning abortion in the state, they introduced a novel legislative approach for running roughshod over constitutional protections: sanctioned vigilantism. The bill is a rehash of a strategy used against abortion in the state. If passed, the law is certain to shut down family-friendly drag events and library story hours, but it threatens all gender-nonconforming performers, and even events like Pride. But given that Texas Republicans are at this very moment attempting to pass a law defining any venue that hosts a drag performance as “a sexually oriented business” - including restaurants - it’s clear that “lascivious” provides no limit to the bounty hunter bill. The inclusion of “lascivious” might suggest that the bill is only aimed at performances in venues that already exclude minors, like nightclubs. The proposed legislation defines “drag” as any “performance in which a performer exhibits a gender that is different than the performer’s gender recorded at birth using clothing, makeup, or other physical markers and sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs in a lascivious manner before an audience.” There is, however, something particularly barbaric in the bill’s explicit encouragement of citizen harassment to drive gender variance out of public life. Given Republicans’ relentless legislative attempts to erase trans and gender nonconforming people, a new bill in Texas that LGBTQ+ advocates are describing as the “drag bounty hunter bill” may seem like a drop in the ocean.
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