The Shakespeare play Twelfth Night is also going to be a problem with this new law.
And keep in mind that this is not actual law yet, and IMHO, is unlikely to be one. OTOH, it does inform us as to what the bigots want, and how badly they are flailing to get it, so it is useful in that regard.
That all said, I do wonder how far this goes, what is a performance, and what is “…a gender identity that is different than the performer’s gender assigned at birth using clothing…”. For instance, could a karaoke bar be declared a sexually oriented business because a ciswoman sings “Sweet Caroline” while wearing pants?
Also, not sure if this is new or an update, but their definition of nude “…any portion of the genitals or buttocks…” would make most pools and beaches nude.
IIRC (and I studied the play in high school so I may not RC) the play involved an indistinguishable pair of twins, one born male and one born female. Which we know would be fraternal twins, not identical ones. Billy S had a pretty shaky grasp on genetics. I think the play has a lot of problems in general. 
(All that being said, I actually like that play quite a bit.)
You can have siblings who look a lot like each other without them being identical twins. Or even fraternal twins.
Sure, but I believe the idea was that they were completely identical despite being different sexes. Here is a line from the play:
An apple cleft in two is not more twin
Than these two creatures
Interestingly, I found a pair of real life identical twins playing Sebastian and Viola in a stage play:
The play is an interesting peek into how gender identity was handled back in the Elizabethan Era. (Of course, through the wacky lens of Shakespeare.)
They couldn’t have been completely identical, because they were, y’know… different sexes. Shakespeare never said they were monozygotic twins, largely because he didn’t know what that was. But that also means you can’t say that he portrayed monozygotic twins incorrectly, because nothing in the play says they’re monozygotic. He wrote a play about two siblings whose are indistinguishable from each other (at least while one of them is in drag), which is a thing that can absolutely happen with non-monozygotic twins, or even non-twin siblings.
I did a bit of research and apparently it is technically possible for identical twins to be born male-female if one of them develops Turner Syndrome.
But it seems clear that they wouldn’t look alike in that case, because the genetic mutation in one twin would lead to the child developing much shorter than her monozygotic identical twin brother.
Still, I had no idea such a thing was possible, ignorance fought.
As are both the cartoon and live-action versions of Mulan. Can’t show those to kids anymore.
Frankly it’s fucking ridiculous to try to pass this kind of bullshit law. I’m not shocked it happened in Texas. Other places I would not be surprised to have this kind of law… Florida or Ohio.
Houston Grand Opera, and AFAICT most other major opera companies, do have on-premises bars that serve alcohol, so they’d become a “sexually oriented business” under the bill’s amendment of the Business and Commerce Code.
But the bill doesn’t even require alcohol consumption to define a “sexually oriented business” under its amended Local Government Code. Such a business is either something along the lines of a sex parlor, adult movie theater, etc., or
I.e., you show a Texas audience anything in the way of an actor portraying a character of a different biological sex from the actor’s own, and you are automatically classed with strip joints and X-rated movies as far as the Local Government Code is concerned.
(But you are right that the “commercial enterprise” specification would exempt school theater groups, for example. I guess the Texas transphobes are sufficiently confident of being able to suppress transgender rights in schools by other means.)
Like I said, I didn’t know if they served, apparently they do.
IANAL, so I may not be parsing this correctly, but it also says
So to my rather untrained legal mind, this indicates that they have to have consumption of alcohol to be classified as a sexually oriented business.
But, as you accurately point out, later it does broaden that definition. Is it actually making two different definitions here, or am I just not reading something right?
I wonder if that means no playing of the Simpsons. Bart is voiced by a woman. (And in fact, many male cartoon and anime characters are voiced by women.)
IANAL, or a Texan, so I’m not quite sure, but there do seem to be two separate legal provisions being reworded in this bill: the first is “Section 102.051, Business & Commerce Code” and the second is “Section 243.002, Local Government Code”.
I have no idea what it means for those two provisions to apparently be using non-identical definitions of “sexually oriented business”, if indeed they are. If I were an opera manager, though, I’d definitely want to get clarification on the legal status of travesti roles under this legislative regulation.
I think those types of performances expect they have a Shirley Exception (and to be honest probably do have a de facto one even though they don’t have one in the law), but I do have a cis woman friend who ran afoul* of the North Carolina bathroom bill when the line for the ladies was too long, so I could be wrong about whether they will have any issues.
*She was kicked out, and the police were called, but she wasn’t arrested, so a trans man in the same scenario still has it worse
They would probably view that as a the law working as intended. A movie aimed at children teaching them to eschew traditional gender roles and promoting female empowerment, is exactly the sort of thing they most want to censor.
As for Shakespeare and opera, only liberal elites watch that sort of thing, so no great loss.
Conservatives have been targeting Mulan for the last couple of years on Fox News.
…DC is now passed a “transgender and abortion refugee bill”, that, in the words of Erin Reed, means “they can’t use ANY means to enforce anti-trans and anti-abortion laws against people fleeing states.”
I’m predicting an increase in Balkanization in the US: some places will increase protections and others will double down on the attacks. As more and more anti-trans legistlation gets passed you will see larger groups of people migrating to States where they will be allowed to live their lives.
And forgive me for a mild digression: but in other parts of the world…
Somebody asked how this would be enforced, and this was one of the (horrific) responses:
Not a lawyer and hopefully I’m misreading, but section 201(c) appears to contain a major typo that nullifies the advertised effect.
The law is a deviation from the Uniform Interstate Depositions and Discovery Act, which sets out the procedure for interstate subpoenas. D.C.'s new provisions require all foreign jurisdictions seeking a deposition or discovery in D.C. to swear that they do not intend or anticipate the request would further a proceeding of the type described in §2-1441.02(a).
§2-1441.02 does not seem to exist. The Human Rights Act of 1977 ends in the 1430s and the D.C. Code picks up again in the 1470s. Google has exactly one result for “2-1441.02”, in a footnote from appendix B-11 of an Urban Institute paper dated to 2005 (almost certainly a typo for 1411.02 concerning the Office of Human Rights which deals with employment, accomodations, and education discrimination).
Contraception, gender-affirming care, and “living arrangement” are newly defined in §2-1401 but there is no paragraph “a” and the definitions wouldn’t describe a type of proceeding anyways.
~Max
I look forward to Republicans passing a Fugitive Fetus Act. 
Or hell, just two people. I once was a judge at a martial arts kata-based competition, and one match was a woman vs. a man, and they were just about physically identical, even to hair color and cut. If you’d told me they were twins, I wouldn’t have been able to dispute it.
…just an anecdote on Twitter. But just about damn near broke me.
https://twitter.com/SuzanneSanders/status/1597818078787948544
Just the reality of what the “war on Transgender people” actually means. People fleeing states. Children interrogated in their homes. Ambulance drivers calling the police when they discover trans kids.