In a packed hearing room on Wednesday, lawmakers gathered in Missouri to embark on a nine-hour marathon session, aiming to pass new legislation focused solely on one topic. The bills considered did not address the economy, healthcare, jobs or inflation, all ranked as top issues for US voters in 2024. Instead, the lengthy committee session concentrated exclusively on agenda item: transgender people in bathrooms, books, schools and doctors offices.

One bill under consideration would allow pharmacists, desk workers and nurses, among others, to refuse to dispense medication or complete paperwork for transgender patients seeking gender-affirming care. Another bill would force trans youth already receiving treatment off their medication, eliminating a grandfather clause allowing them to continue. One bill would end all legal recognition of transgender individuals in the state, echoing the recent anti-transgender laws in Russia and Hungary. Yet another bill would prohibit transgender individuals from using bathrooms of their gender identity in workplaces, potentially mandating small businesses to construct separate bathrooms for them.

The state government, controlled by Republicans, has fallen into an intense moral panic about transgender people. This year, legislators in Missouri have proposed 49 bills targeting transgender people in the first three weeks of January. Though this is higher than any other state this year, there are already 250 bills targeting trans and LGBTQ+ people across the United States – double the pace of 2023, which itself was record-breaking. There appears to be no end in sight; what started with a handful of bills targeting elite sports in 2020 has become a firehose of legislation that touches every aspect of trans people’s lives.

In Missouri, the Democratic state representative David Tyson Smith pointed out the deluge of legislation in the hearing, stating: “This is dominating the airspace. There is only so much bandwidth in this building, as you know, there’s only so much we can do and only so much time we have.”

His fellow Democratic representative Doug Mann concurred and focused on the relentless encroaching of the bills into every aspect of public life, stating: “I’m going to be honest, I do not trust that this is the end. I do not trust that if this passes, that people will be placated, that people will be happy. … Everything I have seen as a student of history, as a student from politics, as a student of government, tells me that it is going to go farther. Things are going to get worse, not better.”

The panic is not contained in Missouri, it has spread across the Republican party nationwide. Early January, the Ohio governor, Mike DeWine, vetoed a gender-affirming care ban, stating that it is parents and doctors who should make decisions about gender-affirming care. In the days following, however, the governor faced endless attacks from rightwing anti-trans media personalities such as Riley Gaines and Matt Walsh, who stated that he must be “run out of Republican politics forever”. Within a day, Republican presidential candidates joined in on the frenzy, with Donald Trump claiming that he had fallen “to the radical left” and DeSantis urging the Ohio legislature to override the veto.

The emphasis on this issue is perplexing, as poll after poll indicates that it ranks very low on the list of voters’ priorities. For example, a 2023 Fox News poll revealed that only 1% of respondents identified “wokeness/transgender issues” as a top concern. This trend is consistent in elections as well; Republicans frequently lose when focusing on this issue. In the recent November elections, school board candidates affiliated with Moms For Liberty and the 1776 Project, both known for their anti-LGBTQ+ stance, lost 70% of their races nationwide. Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, who vetoed a bill banning gender-affirming care, won re-election by a larger margin than his initial victory, despite the opposition’s heavy expenditure on anti-trans campaign ads. Additional examples of political defeats linked to anti-transgender politics are evident in the Virginia legislature, the Wisconsin and Pennsylvania supreme court elections, Georgia’s 2022 Senate race and the Democratic control in Michigan, each of which featured significant money spent on anti-trans ads.

The Republican party, which at one time framed itself as the party of “personal freedom” and “parental rights”, has abandoned the rights of the parents of transgender and LGBTQ+ youth, actively working to strip away freedoms from those it disagrees with.

The party which once claimed to champion “free speech” has become the party of banning LGBTQ+ books and censoring entire college majors in fear of transgender people. The party which raised fears of “death panels deciding your medical care” has sought out to create panels designed to end medical care for vulnerable populations. Caught in a maelstrom of anti-trans hysteria, the Republican party appears to have lost its rational compass, disregarding not only electoral repercussions but also the very principles it once claimed to hold dear. This shift into absurd cruelty was most evident in Missouri on Wednesday night, when the state’s Republican party demonstrated that there are no limits to how far it will go and no principles it will hold to in its zeal to harm its transgender citizens.

• Erin Reed is a transgender journalist based in Washington DC. She tracks LGBTQ+ legislation around the United States for her subscription newsletter, Erin In The Morning