Codifying Binaries: Moral Entrepreneurs and Anti-Transgender Legislation in U.S. State Legislatures Between 2018 and 2024

Amid an escalating moral panic surrounding the transgender community in the United States, state legislatures have become a central site of struggle. This study examines the moral framing of 896 state bills targeting transgender rights introduced between 2018 and 2024. Drawing from scholarship on moral panics and social movement framing, we develop hypotheses about both the content of these bills and their legislative fate. We test these by leveraging an augmented Moral Foundations Dictionary to quantify the prevalence of moralized language within texts. Using a combination of state-year panel models and bill-level regression analyses, we find that the recent surge in anti-transgender legislation has been accompanied by a parallel rise in moralized rhetoric—a trend driven primarily by national changes over time rather than any state-level context. Whether a bill passes, however, is shaped both by bill content and context. Bills are more likely to pass when they are introduced in Republican-controlled legislatures, with lower gender parity, and (most important for our purposes) contain less moralization. Taken together, these findings suggest that while moralization has become a potent symbolic resource in state legislatures in recent years, it remains more so a signaling strategy than a policy-oriented initiative.