Occasionally, the US court system surprises you. Last Friday, Trump-appointed federal judge Thomas Parker ruled that Tennessee’s anti-drag law was unconstitutional, just as Pride Month was kicking off.

Parker’s decision follows a temporary block he’d placed on the law in March, after Tennessee earned the dubious distinction of being the first state to pass an outright ban on drag performances in public spaces where minors might be present.

(Technically the law, which stipulates that a first offence is a misdemeanour and a second offence is a felony, does not contain the word “drag”. It simply bans “adult cabaret performances” of a “prurient” nature from being held in any space where they might be seen by minors, and conveniently defines performances that involve “male or female impersonators” as “adult cabaret performances”.)

Parker’s decision may come too late for some organisers of Pride events that may have been changed or cancelled due to the uncertainty around the law, but it does give queer Tennesseans some relief, at least for a year or two.

I’d be surprised if Tennessee’s Republican-controlled state government fails to appeal, though, leaving the ban’s ultimate fate to be decided by the unfairly stacked right-wing Supreme Court, which is almost certain to uphold it. With that in mind, the best-case scenario in the medium term will likely be one in which legal manoeuvring takes up as much time as possible.

When Tennessee’s drag ban was announced, I and many other commentators saw in it an attempt to drag the state back half a century to the bad old days in which police harassment of anyone an officer deemed to be cross-dressing was a common occurrence. Such authoritarian enforcement of gender conformity and heteronormativity was (among other things) an attack on the very existence of transgender people – and I was among those concerned that Tennessee’s law could be used to attack trans people simply going about their daily lives.

Thankfully, trans Tennesseans will not have to face that harsh reality for the time being. But a handful of other states have passed similar bans this year, and in one of them the law has already been used to attack a trans individual.

Texas and Montana

As bills targeting drag advanced through the Texas and Montana state legislatures this year, their Republican sponsors debated the specific language the bills should use in order to avoid constitutional challenges.

The law Texas eventually passed on 28 May contains no direct references to drag, but criminalises “sexually oriented performances” where children are present, and the venues that host them. Earlier versions of the bill explicitly mentioned drag and defined performances involving “a male performer exhibiting as a female, or a female performer exhibiting as a male, who uses clothing, makeup, or other similar physical markers and who sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs before an audience” as “sexually oriented” performances.

These earlier versions make legislators’ goals abundantly clear. Since the law is so narrowly focused on performances, it may be difficult for anti-LGBTIQ officials to use it to police gender expression more broadly, but we should absolutely keep an eye out to see just how far Texas manages to stretch the definition of “performance”.

Meanwhile, Montana – a massive and sparsely populated Western state once known for a ‘live and let live’ ethos – took a different tack. Starting with a sweeping anti-drag bill, Republican legislators opted for the language of “sexually oriented” performances with minors present, but they also found a way to go further.

Montana’s law went into effect on 22 May when Republican governor Greg Gianforte signed the bill. The law directly targets drag, but in a more limited way by banning ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ and similar events from taking place in publicly funded schools and libraries – though it’s not clear how many (if any) such events have ever taken place in the state.

As the bill made its way through the state legislature, the first openly trans person elected to that body, Democrat Zooey Zephyr, warned that it would be used against trans people. Sadly, she was proven right a mere week after the law took effect, when last week the Butte-Silver Bow Public Library in southwest Montana cancelled a lecture by Native American trans woman Adria Jawort, who had planned to discuss two-spirit history.

You might think that, as illiberal and wrong as this is, it is still quite different from trans people being arrested simply for going about their daily lives dressed in ways they prefer to dress. But given the pace with which anti-LGBTIQ legislative activity has escalated in conservative states over the last few years, there is no reason to think things will stop here.

The pattern so far has been to pass more widely accepted laws, such as trans sports bans, using the debate as a vehicle to introduce cruel, false and dehumanising tropes and rhetoric against trans people and drag performers (categories that conservatives tend to incorrectly conflate), which then serves to fuel harsher legislation in the next session.

A few years back, bans on gender-affirming healthcare for trans minors would have been inconceivable. Now, a frightening 20 American states have passed such bans – and Florida has even managed a de facto ban on most gender-affirming care for adults, which amounts to forced detransition for many of the state’s approximately 100,000 trans adult residents.Legal challenges to these laws will continue, but the Supreme Court is unlikely to rule favourably for trans people or drag performers.

The bottom line is clear. The Republican base, and many of the party’s elected officials, do not want trans people to exist – at least not as ourselves, thriving, in public, or in any way that involves them having to see us and accept us.

In fact, the escalation in anti-LGBTIQ legislative attacks is so severe that Human Rights Campaign, the largest pro-LGBTIQ lobbying group in America, has now declared a state of emergency for queer Americans.

Unless the momentum of this anti-trans frenzy is arrested, things will continue to get worse year on year. That we are already seeing an anti-drag state law used to target a trans individual is a very ominous sign regarding how bad things could get in the future.