Earlier this month, the Texas Republican Party met for its annual convention at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. Delegates chose the party’s new leader and set its priorities ahead of this fall’s midterms (and watched an elephant pee on the floor). They endorsed a platform that shifted right on a litany of issues, from calling to ban in vitro fertilization and punishing women who get abortions to halting the “Islamification” of Texas. And they added new provisions that move the platform even further to the right on LGBTQ+ rights.
The Texas Republican Party’s official party platform, essentially a wishlist of policies that skews more conservative than the average state legislator, has long said that “homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice.” But in recent years, delegates have added more provisions related to transgender people. Both the 2024 and 2026 platforms state that the Texas GOP opposes “all efforts to validate transgender identity and ideology.”
And while the 2024 platform called for bans on any “normalizing curriculum” about transgender people in public schools, the 2026 platform added a call for a ban on transgender people working in schools in any capacity, as well as a ban on using trans people’s pronouns.
“We support the prohibition of transgender individuals from serving in any school district positions, including in volunteer roles, and mandate the exclusive use of pronouns corresponding to a person’s biological sex at birth,” the newly adopted platform reads.
The 2026 platform also calls for parents of trans children, and doctors who provide them gender affirming care, to be prosecuted for child abuse “regardless of profession, relation, or standing.” The new party platform says that gender-affirming care, like hormones and puberty blockers, surgeries, therapy, and even allowing a trans person to use a new name and pronouns, should be illegal for anyone between the ages of 18 and 26, even as legal adults. The Texas GOP’s platform also endorses conversion therapy—or “authentic reparative therapy”—for gay and trans people, despite the practice being condemned by every major medical organization.
Besides these new provisions, the platform has the standard fare. It says that the party only supports marriage defined as being between “one biological man” and “one biological woman,” opposes gay marriage, and calls for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark ruling that made gay marriage the law of the land. Also, somewhat bafflingly, the platform calls for the Texas legislature to repeal “all laws based on all research” by the sexuality researcher Alfred Kinsey.
Already, Texas has outlawed gender-affirming care for minors and restricted the sports teams that trans students may play on, among a bevy of anti-trans laws and state actions. Some of these planks have already been proposed as laws or have support in the broader party. In 2024, Abbott suggested at a conservative youth forum that transgender and gender-nonconforming teachers should either be forced to dress in line with their biological sex or banned from teaching altogether. Last legislative session, proposed bills would have banned gender-affirming care in the state for all ages and charged transgender Texans with fraud if their identifying documents mismatched their appearance, though neither came close to becoming law.
While targeting transgender Texans and their families has become a mainstay of Texas Republican politics in recent years, the state party has increasingly become focused on the so-called “Islamification” of Texas. Panic over new mosques, halal food at grocery stores, “Sharia Zones” and the immigration of Islam-practicing residents to North Texas suburbs has somewhat replaced the focus on trans people as the animating issue on Texas’ furthest right flank. But as the 2026 GOP platform shows, they’ve haven’t forgotten to keep going further on LGBTQ+ issues.