Lawmakers are wasting no time prioritizing what will likely be two of the more controversial bills of the legislative session.

On Wednesday, Equal Opportunity Initiatives, or HB261, is set to go in front of the House Education Committee. Sponsored by Rep. Katy Hall, R-South Ogden, in the House and Sen. Keith Grover, R-Provo, in the Senate, the bill would restrict certain diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Utah.

That same day, Sex-based Designations for Privacy, Anti-bullying, and Women’s Opportunities, or HB257, will go before the House Business and Labor Committee. Sponsored by Rep. Kera Birkeland, R-Morgan, the bill would prevent transgender people from accessing both men’s and women’s bathrooms, locker rooms and other types of private areas in publicly funded facilities.

On Tuesday, Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, hinted that the diversity, equity and inclusion bill will move quickly through the legislature.

He would “love to hear it as it comes. But hopefully we won’t spend the entire session on it, there are other issues,” Adams said.

It’s reminiscent of last year’s legislative session, where just two weeks in Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed another bill mired in controversy, SB16, which banned transgender surgeries for Utah children and teens.

Utah’s Democratic leadership called the fast pace concerning.

“We need to provide more time for the community to engage with this,” said House Minority Leader Angela Romero, D-Salt Lake City. “We meet for 45 days, we push the legislation through and this is why people feel like they don’t have a voice anymore.”

Romero spoke during media availability on Tuesday, the first day of the legislative session, where minority leaders in both the House and Senate laid out their priorities and concerns. Top of mind, Romero said, are lawmakers “trying to erase people, whether they’re transgender, whether they’re a person of color.”

Democrats: For communities of color, ‘war has been declared’

The Equal Opportunity Initiatives bill would restructure diversity, equity and inclusion offices in public universities so their services are available to all students, including those at risk, rather than focusing on minority populations.

It would also bar public schools, universities and governmental employers from having “discriminatory practices” based on “personal identity characteristics” including “race, color, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, religion or gender identity.”

“Everyone is concerned about diversity and inclusion,” Hall told Utah News Dispatch last week. “But … in order to gain that we can’t be discriminatory in order to achieve that.”

Rep. Sandra Hollins, D-Salt Lake City, did not mince words when explaining her problems with the bill.

“I’ve heard from a number of people in the community, particularly in communities of color, who feel that war has been declared on them in this state,” she said.

Hollins worries about the overall impact on teachers and schools — whether the law is “tying teachers’ hands to be able to have open conversations and talk about different things in the school system,” she said.

Romero said her Republican colleagues were open with them, and that the process wasn’t done “in the shadows.” But like the public, they first read the language in the bill when it was released on Thursday, said Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City.

“We were surprised to see the extent of this bil,” Escamilla said, noting that the bill targets three general areas: higher education, K-12 and governmental entities.

Escamilla said the conversation started with ways to dismantle or reorganize diversity, equity and inclusion programs at colleges and universities, and evolved to include government and public schools.

“To throw in local governmental entities, that impacts the way Salt Lake City and other cities manage their cities. And so not only did we (not) give the public an opportunity to have input, we didn’t give our local mayors and our local elected officials the opportunity to talk about how this is going to impact them,” Escamilla said.

Escamilla said she doesn’t see the “pragmatic” reasoning behind a 24-page bill that dictates “a complete shift on a policy regarding conversations on race, ethnicity, gender.”

Democrats take issue with lack of ‘nuance’ in transgender bathroom bill

Birkland’s bill, which she said is aimed at ensuring privacy for all Utahns, would codify measures based on Title IX, a 1972 federal law that bans gender discrimination in school programs.

Sex-based Designations for Privacy, Anti-bullying, and Women’s Opportunities would restrict transgender access in both men’s and women’s bathrooms, locker rooms and other types of private areas in publicly funded facilities, ranging from county buildings to jails. It would also attempt to expand single-stall or unisex restroom and locker facilities by requiring government entities to provide a certain number of single-occupant facilities in newly built buildings.

“The goal is to make sure that there’s enough single-stall facilities so everyone has a place where they can be, (for) changing, using the restroom, showering and privacy,” Birkeland said in a recent interview with Utah News Dispatch.

On Tuesday, Democrats called for a more nuanced approach, blasting the bill’s definition of a woman, which reads: “the characteristic of an individual whose biological reproductive system is of the general type that functions to produce ova.”

“There’s some very obvious areas of confusion,” said Rep. Rosemary Lesser, D-Ogden, who noted postmenopausal women or prepubescent girls might be exempt under the bill. “I have never seen that type of definition for the female gender.”

Salt Lake Democratic Sen. Jen Plumb said she sees no room for compromise on Birkland’s bill, calling it an invasion of privacy and criticizing how it restricts “certain members of our society” from taking “care of a biological need.”

“If we really are wanting to talk about what safety in those private spaces looks like, let’s talk about it for everyone. Let’s not not equate it with some particular anatomy, or with a particular potential request that you would have to violate a child’s privacy to verify whether they were in the right bathroom area or not,” she said.

Utah News Dispatch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news source covering government, policy and the issues most impacting the lives of Utahns.

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