Opinion — Misplaced priorities: Policing trans bodies over securing our freedoms

As Georgia’s 2025 legislative session came to a close this summer, advocates witnessed a blatant disregard for the material needs of everyday Georgians. Georgia lawmakers spent crucial time pushing SB 185 in the final days of session—a callous bill aimed at banning gender-affirming care for transgender people in Georgia’s prisons. Rather than advancing legislation that would dramatically improve health outcomes and reproductive freedom across the state, lawmakers chose to invest in cruelty.

The fixation on incarcerated trans people was just one of many anti-trans attacks from Georgia lawmakers this session. Legislators also introduced bills targeting gender-affirming healthcare for state employees and youth as well as a ban on trans women and girls from participating in sports that align with their gender. 

Despite the widespread moral panic surrounding trans people, alleging that trans women in particular pose a threat to public safety and the sanctity of sex-segregated spaces, these concerns are baseless. In reality, there are currently only five incarcerated trans-Georgians seeking gender-affirming care. This means that lawmakers wrote, sponsored, assigned to a committee, debated and voted on a piece of legislation aimed at five people. Trans people are very real; the alleged danger they pose is not. 

This statistic is a sobering reminder that these laws are not about staving off some mortal threat to women or preserving so-called “women’s rights.” Indeed, most anti-trans lawmakers are also anti-abortion extremists who oppose bodily autonomy more broadly. These attacks are about creating scapegoats and making trans people hypervisible targets in order to distract from the government’s failure to address Georgians’ actual needs: access to healthcare, the ability to afford basic necessities, and the right to make personal decisions free from government interference.

The harmful justifications used for SB 185 mirror those behind Georgia’s abortion bans. Lawmakers argue that taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be used for “elective” procedures for people they deem immoral or undeserving, whether that’s incarcerated trans people or pregnant Georgians seeking abortion care.

Meanwhile, the Reproductive Freedom Act (RFA) was reintroduced in the Georgia legislature on February 24 (HB 598 and SB 246). This bill offers a bold and expansive vision for reproductive freedom, affirming every Georgian’s right to access abortion care without fear, stigma, or criminalization.

By passing the RFA, Georgia legislators had the opportunity to:

• Repeal all abortion bans in Georgia, including the state’s six-week gestation ban along with the former viability ban that cut legal abortion access at around 20 to 22 weeks.  
• Enshrine the right to abortion in state law—Georgians’ current access to abortion, post-abortion and miscarriage care is at the whim of the state. The RFA places laws relating to abortion back where they belong, in the healthcare code instead of the criminal code.
• Expand access to timely care: People in Georgia receiving public healthcare (i.e., state employees and those on Medicare or Medicaid) cannot have their abortion care covered by their state-funded plans, which makes it more difficult to access this critical, life-affirming care. The RFA would ensure that everyone in the state, regardless of income or employer, can have access to care. 
• Mitigate the racial and economic disparities in maternal healthcare. We have already seen the tragic repercussions of abortion bans, specifically illustrated by the devastating cases of three Georgian Black women and mothers of young children: Candi Miller, Amber Thurman, and Adriana Smith. These women, and Smith’s family, deserved timely and medically appropriate healthcare but instead, doctors and hospitals expressed confusion over the state’s abortion laws and the women were left to suffer the consequences.  
• Show Georgians that they are invested in passing laws that reflect the will of the people: Almost 80% of Georgians believe that the government shouldn’t be interfering in our decisions about abortion and that we should instead trust pregnant people to make the decisions that are right for them. 

What Georgia lawmakers chose to do this session was deliberate. They ignored life-saving legislation that would have helped thousands of Georgians (especially Black, low-income, rural, and young residents) in favor of a manufactured moral panic that prohibits care for five people. This isn’t governance and it isn’t about policy. Georgians deserve better.