Does Ohio HB 249 Criminalize Being Transgender in Public?

It is one of the most direct questions being asked about Ohio House Bill 249, the Indecent Exposure Modernization Act: does this bill make it a crime to simply be transgender in public?

The answer is not a simple yes or no — and the reason it is not simple matters more than the headline either side is telling you.

HB 249 passed the Ohio House on March 25, 2026, by a 63–32 vote and now sits in the Ohio Senate awaiting a vote. The bill contains two separate legal mechanisms that critics say could be used against transgender Ohioans in very different ways. Supporters say both mechanisms are narrowly targeted at obscene conduct, not identity. Understanding which side is legally right — and where the honest uncertainty lies — requires examining each mechanism separately on its own terms.

This article does exactly that.

Two Separate Mechanisms, Two Separate Questions

Most coverage of HB 249 treats the transgender question as a single issue. It is not. The bill affects transgender people through two distinct legal provisions that operate differently, carry different penalties, and raise different legal concerns.

Mechanism One is the adult cabaret performance clause in ORC § 2907.39, which defines a new criminal offense called “unlawful adult cabaret performance.” This clause is where the bill explicitly references gender identity and biological sex.

Mechanism Two is the public indecency update in ORC § 2907.09, which replaces the term “private parts” with “private area” in Ohio’s existing indecency law. This clause does not mention gender identity at all — but the bill’s own primary sponsor confirmed on the House floor that it is intended to affect transgender people in public facilities.

Each needs to be analyzed separately.

Mechanism One: The Adult Cabaret Performance Clause

What the Bill Actually Says

The bill defines an “adult cabaret performance” to include, among other things, performances by:

“performers or entertainers who exhibit a gender identity that is different from the performer’s or entertainer’s biological sex using clothing, makeup, prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts, or other physical markers.”

The bill then defines “biological sex” as:

“the biological indication of male and female, including sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex hormones, gonads, and nonambiguous internal and external genitalia present at birth, without regard to an individual’s psychological, chosen, or subjective experience of gender.”

An “unlawful adult cabaret performance” occurs when such a performance takes place outside of a licensed adult cabaret, in a location where minors may be present, and when the performance is harmful to juveniles or obscene under existing Ohio law.

Does This Criminalize Being Transgender?

Supporters of the bill say no — because the offense requires that the performance be obscene or harmful to juveniles. Simply being transgender in public and dressing accordingly, they argue, does not meet the obscenity threshold under the Miller test, which requires that material appeal to prurient interest, be patently offensive, and lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The Center for Christian Virtue, a primary backer of the bill, has stated that HB 249 does not change the legal definition of obscenity and only applies to performances that already meet that existing standard.

Critics say that argument is legally accurate on paper but misses the practical reality of how the law would be applied. TransOhio Executive Director Dara Adkison has argued that the bill’s broad language effectively makes a statute that law enforcement professionals can enforce based on personal ideas about what constitutes appropriate gender representation and what counts as a performance.

The legal tension is real and it has a name. When a law’s language is broad enough that its enforcement depends on the individual judgment of the officer making the initial decision, constitutional scholars call it a “void for vagueness” problem. A law does not have to successfully convict someone to cause harm. The threat of prosecution — and the chilling effect that creates on protected expression — is itself a constitutional injury.

What the Bill’s Own Sponsor Said

This is where the debate moves beyond legal theory and into the record of legislative intent. During House floor debate, an amendment was proposed that would have removed the gender identity language from the bill entirely, limiting it to performances that are explicitly sexual in nature regardless of who is performing.

Rep. Josh Williams, the bill’s primary sponsor, opposed that amendment directly, telling fellow lawmakers: “This amendment subverts the intentions of the bill’s sponsors. It undermines the specific obscene and child endangerment acts we are trying to legislate out.” In other words, Williams confirmed on the record that the gender identity provision is not incidental — it is intentional and central to the bill’s purpose.

Legislative intent matters in statutory interpretation. When a court is asked whether a law was designed to target a specific group, statements made by sponsors during floor debate are admissible evidence of that intent. The Tennessee ruling on a similar law specifically cited legislative transcripts showing that “drag” was the target, even though the word never appeared in the statute — using that evidence to conclude that the law was drafted to chill constitutionally protected speech.

The Bona Fide Performance Exemption — And Its Limits

The bill does include one explicit exemption relevant here. It states that the offense does not apply to “a bona fide film, concert, or other artistic performance that is not obscene or not harmful to juveniles.”

Supporters point to this exemption as evidence that mainstream performances — including those featuring transgender performers — are protected. A Broadway touring company performing in Ohio, or a transgender musician performing at a concert venue, would not be covered.

But the exemption raises its own question: who decides what is “bona fide”? The bill provides no definition. A community theater production, an outdoor Pride festival performance, a drag story hour at a public library — all could plausibly be described as artistic performances. Whether they qualify as “bona fide” under this bill is, again, a judgment call made first by an officer and then by a prosecutor.

Mechanism Two: The “Private Area” Change and Locker Rooms

This is the second legal mechanism — and in some ways the more straightforwardly concerning one, because the bill’s own sponsor confirmed its intent on the record.

What Changed in the Indecency Statute

Ohio’s existing public indecency law, ORC § 2907.09, previously prohibited reckless exposure of “private parts” in public. That term was never defined in the statute. HB 249 replaces “private parts” with “private area,” which the bill defines to include genitals, pubic area, buttocks, and the female breast below the top of the areola, whether nude or covered by an undergarment.

A section of the bill that substitutes “private part” for “private area” would criminalize trans and gender-nonconforming people who use gendered public facilities to change clothing during ordinary daily life.

The Xenia YMCA Case — and What the Sponsor Said About It

The bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Josh Williams, repeatedly cited a 2022 incident in Xenia, Ohio, as the real-world justification for this change. Greene County resident Janell Holloway filed a lawsuit after she saw a nude transgender woman using the public locker room at a YMCA in Xenia. A municipal court judge found the transgender woman not guilty of public indecency in 2023.

That acquittal frustrated the bill’s supporters. CCV Policy Executive Director David Mahan testified that HB 249 would prevent judges from being able to rule that way in future cases. “This bill would prevent judges from being able to do that in the future,” he said.

Rep. Williams told lawmakers the bill would stop transgender Ohioans from using gendered public facilities like locker rooms to change their clothing — a use case that has nothing to do with drag performance.

This is a significant admission. The locker room scenario is not a drag performance. The transgender woman in Xenia was not performing. She was changing her clothes. The fact that a bill titled the “Indecent Exposure Modernization Act” is being explicitly designed to produce a different legal outcome for that type of situation — dressing in a facility that matches one’s gender identity — is what critics mean when they say the bill criminalizes transgender daily life.

What This Means Practically

Under current Ohio law, a transgender woman using a women’s locker room and changing her clothes was found not guilty of public indecency by a court. The Xenia case established that outcome. HB 249, as described by its own sponsors, is designed to close that legal outcome and make similar conduct prosecutable going forward.

Equality Ohio Executive Director Dwayne Steward has stated that the bill takes regular, everyday activities and turns them into potential crimes based on whether somebody else might be offended by what other people are wearing, and gives government unacceptable power to police what people wear.

What Supporters Say the Bill Is Really About

A legally complete analysis requires presenting the proponent argument fully and fairly.

Supporters of HB 249 frame both mechanisms as child protection measures rooted in existing Ohio obscenity law. They argue that the adult cabaret performance clause applies only to conduct that is already obscene or harmful to minors under standards that courts have approved for decades. They further argue that the private area change clarifies existing law rather than expanding it and that the Xenia case represented a loophole in Ohio’s indecency statute that no reasonable person would defend.

Rep. Williams stated that Ohio has clear gaps in its indecent exposure and obscenity laws and that children should not be exposed to obscene material in person any more than they can be exposed to it online.

The Center for Christian Virtue has argued that without this bill, nothing prevents sexually suggestive or explicit performances from taking place in public spaces like parks, festivals, and libraries where children are present, and that the bill simply applies to public performances the same standard that already governs strip clubs and adult venues.

These arguments deserve honest engagement. The legal standards for obscenity are established and judicially reviewed. If HB 249 truly applied only to conduct that meets those standards, it would almost certainly be constitutional. The dispute is not about whether obscenity can be regulated — it can. The dispute is about whether the bill’s language is precise enough to ensure that only obscene conduct falls within it.

What Similar Laws Have Shown in Court

Ohio is not the first state to navigate this question. The Tennessee experience is directly relevant because it involved nearly identical bill language, the same Sixth Circuit federal appeals jurisdiction that covers Ohio, and the same core dispute about vagueness and First Amendment scope.

A federal judge initially struck down Tennessee’s law, finding it was both “unconstitutionally vague and substantially overbroad” and encouraged “discriminatory enforcement.” He drew a sharp distinction between material that is “obscene” in everyday conversation and material that is legally obscene under First Amendment doctrine, noting that sexually explicit but non-obscene speech does not receive reduced constitutional protection.

The judge used the example of a female performer wearing an Elvis Presley costume, noting that she could be characterized as a “male impersonator” and potentially face prosecution under the law despite performing entirely mainstream entertainment.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed that ruling on procedural grounds — finding that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing to sue — without ruling on the constitutional merits. The constitutional questions raised by the Tennessee law therefore remain unresolved.

For Ohio, this means: if HB 249 becomes law, it will almost certainly face a federal constitutional challenge in the same Sixth Circuit. That court has not yet ruled on the merits of whether such laws violate the First Amendment. That ruling, when it comes, will be the decisive legal event.

The Honest Answer to the Question

So: does Ohio HB 249 criminalize being transgender in public?

Here is what the law and the record actually support:

What the bill does not do on its face: It does not contain a provision that says “being transgender is a crime.” It does not criminalize gender identity as a status. On its face, the adult cabaret performance clause requires that conduct be obscene or harmful to juveniles before it triggers criminal penalties.

What the bill does do in practice, by the sponsors’ own admission: The bill is explicitly designed to produce criminal liability in situations where transgender people are simply living their daily lives — specifically, the locker room scenario in Xenia. Rep. Williams said this on the House floor. That is not a critic’s interpretation. It is a sponsor’s statement.

What the bill creates through its vague language: The ACLU of Ohio has argued that the interpretations and applications of the bill’s vague terms are left entirely to the police officer who cites or arrests the suspect and the prosecutor who charges them — and that this uncertainty causes people not to perform or express themselves for fear they will be targeted, even when no prosecution ever occurs. In First Amendment law, this is a chilling effect, and it is a recognized constitutional injury.

What the broader legal record shows: Laws using nearly identical language in other states have been found by at least one federal judge to encourage discriminatory enforcement — meaning they create conditions where the law can be applied selectively to disfavored groups rather than uniformly to conduct that meets the legal definition.

The straightforward answer is this: HB 249 does not make the status of being transgender a crime. But it creates legal mechanisms that, as described by its own sponsors, are intended to produce criminal consequences for ordinary transgender daily life in Ohio — and it does so through language vague enough that initial enforcement decisions rest on individual officer judgment rather than clearly defined legal standards.

Whether that survives constitutional scrutiny will ultimately be decided by federal courts. Until then, if you are a transgender Ohioan, a performer, or anyone whose daily expression could intersect with this bill’s definitions, consulting a licensed Ohio attorney before the law takes effect is the appropriate step.

By AllAboutLawyer.com | Updated April 4, 2026

Also on AllAboutLawyer.com:

• What Does “Regardless of Whether It’s for Consideration” Mean in Ohio HB 249?
• Ohio HB 249 Penalties: When Does a Misdemeanor Become a Felony?
• The Xenia YMCA Case That Started It All: What Actually Happened

Legal Disclaimer: This article is for general informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. The law discussed here reflects HB 249 as passed by the Ohio House and has not yet been signed into law. Legal outcomes depend on specific facts, circumstances, and applicable law at the time of any legal proceeding. If you have questions about how this or any other law may affect your specific situation, consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction.