
State Senator John Kavanagh speaking with attendees at the 2023 Legislative Forecast Luncheon hosted by the Arizona Chamber of Commerce & Industry at Chase Field in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo by Gage Skidmore.
The official second and third bills that were filed ahead of this year’s legislative session are alarmingly familiar to transgender youth, their families, and allies of the LGBTQ community.
Senate Bill 1002 prevents teachers and employees from referring to a student by a name or pronoun that differs from their given name or biological sex without obtaining written permission from a parent. Senate Bill 1003 prohibits trans students from using locker rooms, bathrooms, and hotel rooms that don’t match their biological sex while on school trips. Both proposals apply only to public and charter schools.
The bills’ sponsor, Sen. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, has unsuccessfully pushed anti-trans legislation for years, leading the charge among the state’s Republican legislative majority and matching nationwide opposition to pro-LGBTQ policy from the Republican party.
The Republican-controlled legislature passed two bills nearly identical to SB1002 and SB1003 in 2024, but the pair were vetoed by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs. Kelley Dupps, inclusive policy advocacy manager for the LGBTQ youth advocacy group GLSEN Arizona, believes Hobbs will continue to be an effective blockade to Republicans’ attempts to pass discriminatory legislation during her administration and sees Kavanagh’s latest bills as little more than political theater.
But Kavanagh is confident that this year, the political willpower is on his side.
With a larger Republican majority in the state legislature and the absence of Republican Sen. Ken Bennett, who in 2024 sided with Democrats in voting Kavanagh’s bills down from being added to the ballot, Kavanagh believes his policies will make it to the voters in 2026.
Kavanagh is also hoping to gain votes from Democrats this time around, and pointed to the party’s widespread losses in the election as all the more reason they should support his legislation.
“I am hoping that after being rebuked for their far left policies in the last election, when the Democrats, especially those in swing districts, will think twice before they vote a radical position on these bills,” he told The Copper Courier.
But for families like the Trujillo family, the continued debate that happens every year in the state legislature surrounding pronouns and access to public bathrooms is a growing frustration.
“[Lawmakers] deliberately use my experience and my identity as not only a trans person, but just a person, to gain votes and hold an office, which is really disheartening as a constituent, because I’m just trying to live my life,” said Daniel Trujillo, a high school junior in Tucson, who is trans.
“I just think it’s crazy, like people are still hung up on me, my body and my trans identity, when I am so much more,” Daniel said.
Hiding discrimination behind a curtain of “protecting students”
SB 1002 forces schools to “out” children to their families by requiring parental consent in order for students to be addressed by a name other than what’s on their birth certificate. This could put students who may not be in safe homes in an even riskier situation, potentially facing homelessness and family rejection because of their gender identity, said Dupps, who is also a trans man.
40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ, and 26% of homeless LGBTQ youth report being forced out of their homes solely because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.
Daniel’s mother, Lizette, has always supported him and his identity, and drives him to a school outside the district they live in because of its inclusive and supportive policies for students.
But she knows this kind of support can be a rarity and worries about the LGBTQ youth out there who don’t have familial support, and rely on trusted adults like a teacher or school staff member they can trust to share their identity with.
Daniel has friends who are also transgender but do not have the same kind of support at home that he does. “If [their] teachers were forced by law to out [them], they would be unsafe,” he said.

Daniel Trujillo at the Arizona State Capitol for LGBTQ+ Youth Day, May 1, 2024. Photo courtesy Lizette Trujillo.
Kavanagh told The Copper Courier that his pronoun bill is “actually pro-LGBT,” because it is notifying the parent of a transgender student that their child is at risk of having poor mental health or considering suicide, and for cases where a medical provider advises against using “a pronoun non aligned with biology.”
But, simply being transgender does not place a student at higher risk of considering suicide—family rejection is a significant contributing factor to the elevated suicide rates among LGBTQ youth, according to the Trevor Project.
“I’m trying to prevent them from psychological harm caused by schools secretly engaging in gender transformation processes that the medical provider for the child says is harmful,” Kavanagh said. “School personnel should not override medical professionals and secretly transition children when it could be harmful psychologically.”
But, Kavanagh could not provide an example of this really happening in practice, “By definition, no one would be aware of secret transitioning,” he said.
Schools are not involved with making gender-affirming care decisions for children, and there is no evidence of this to back up the statements Kavanagh has made.
Kavanagh said that any pro-LGBTQ organizations or people he has been in conversation with about the bills have been in “vehement opposition” to them, but he’s still made the choice to bring the bills back year after year.
Kavanagh earned an “F” score on GLSEN’s Arizona’s 2024 Legislative Session Report Card for LGBTQIA+ Support.
Being trans doesn’t automatically mean that someone has mental health issues, even if lawmakers want to keep equating it to that — the reality is, discrimination and lack of support leads to poor mental health, Lizette said.
SB1002 includes an exemption for school employees who can refuse to address a person by a pronoun or name that differs from their biological sex for “religious or moral convictions.”
With this exemption, the bills have a discriminatory focus, said Gaelle Esposito, lobbyist with the progressive firm Creosote Partners, who is also a trans woman. “[They have a] targeted bullying attitude of, well, you have to get parental permission, but if you get parental permission in a way we don’t like, we can still discriminate against you,” she said.
Attempts at bathroom bans make their return
Senate Bill 1003 prohibits trans students from using locker rooms, bathrooms, and hotel rooms on school trips that don’t match their biological sex, and schools found in violation could face lawsuits from cisgender students seeking financial compensation for any “psychological, emotional and physical harm.”
There are only minor changes in the wording of Kavanagh’s bills over the past few years, such as the removal of a section detailing that any government-issued identification document can be provided for evidence of a person’s biological sex, that appeared in the 2022 and 2023 similar bills, but not the most recently introduced bill.
He removed that line from the bill because of concern that some government entities would allow people to self-attest their sex on those documents, according to a spokesperson for Kavanagh.
There are already rules and laws against entering bathrooms to harm someone; what these bills will actually do, Dupps believes, is demonize LGBTQ kids and create circumstances that are unsafe for all students.
The bathroom bills aren’t about bathrooms – they are about discrimination, and the government is attempting to insert itself into family matters, said Esposito.
Kavanagh’s proposals hide behind a facade of “helping” LGBTQ students, but according to Dupps, this type of legislation is harmful to the entire student body, including cisgender and heterosexual students. “You’re placing them [students] in a space where suddenly everyone’s questioning someone’s gender or someone’s ability to be in a bathroom.”
These bills would also put school staff in the position of being the “gender, bathroom and pronoun police,” when that’s not their job, Dupps said.
Kavanagh said he “respects people’s basic sense of modesty” in the context of the bill, which he defined as an innate sense of privacy that is breached when someone uses a public restroom with someone of a different sex.
“I don’t know about you, but the few times in my life when I wandered by mistake into a public ladies room and discovered it, I felt uneasy and somewhat shocked, the women looked shocked, and I quickly retreated,” Kavanagh said. “Human beings have a natural sense of modesty and privacy, and we need to respect that, it’s especially acute in a school shower.”
LGBTQ advocates have pointed out in committee hearings of previous versions of the bill that Kavanagh’s proposals actually dismiss respect for trans students.
Kavanagh said he does not think his position is radical, and instead, a radical position would be “making a 14 year old female girl stand naked next to an 18 year old biological male naked in a shower.”
To date, no lawmaker or school official has attempted to mandate that high school students of a different sex shower naked next to each other as Kavanagh has suggested.
Lawmakers hung up on ‘bodies’
Kavanagh’s bills, and other similar ones around the country, force the conversation to stay reductive, and to remain “just about bodies,” Lizette said.
“So you no longer see a whole human being in front of you,” Lizette said.”You see a caricature, and you can reduce people to just body parts and scare people into thinking that these aren’t whole human beings who are loved in their families.”
In the 2024 legislation session, Daniel and several other trans students and their parents met with Kavanagh to express their concerns with the previous legislation he sponsored.
When people have shared their lived experiences with Kavanagh to inform him of the context and effects of the bills he’s putting forth, Dupps doesn’t believe their experiences are not valued in the way that they should be.
“He was incredibly rude, very disrespectful, and focused a lot on… bodies and genitals,” Daniel said.
Kavanagh asked the minors in the room what their biological makeup was, Lizette said.
The Arizona State Capitol is one of the only spaces where Daniel said he has experienced transphobia — he has been misgendered, and deadnamed, along with being dismissed for his lived experiences just for being young.
At home and at school, Daniel said he is supported and encouraged to be himself. “Then when I have to go to the capitol and testify is when I am no longer supported and affirmed by people who constantly say they’re trying to protect me,” he said.

Washington DC at the ACLU/Lambda Legal Freedom to be Rally on the steps of the Supreme Court on Dec 4, 2024. Photo courtesy Lizette Trujillo.
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