In October, a little-known state lawmaker from South Dakota attended a one-day event, hosted by the Heritage Foundation, aimed at advancing “conservative solutions to protect children from sexualization in culture, education, and healthcare.” In a newsletter published the following month by South Dakota’s Legislative Research Council, that lawmaker, Republican state Representative Fred Deutsch, said he had brought home an idea from the summit: to “establish legislation to criminalize doctors that provide sex change operations in children.”

At the start of the 2020 legislative session just a few months later, Deutsch introduced a bill that would criminalize doctors for providing medically accepted health care, like puberty blockers and hormones, to transgender patients under the age of 16. After introducing the bill, H.B. 1057, Deutsch said in a release from his office that it was designed to protect children from “dangerous drugs and treatments,” despite medical consensus in support of this kind of care.

The bill was approved by the state House in January but failed to pass out of committee in the state Senate this week. Deutsch told The New Republic that the Senate committee vote “was fully expected” and that he could not say if he would consider introducing similar legislation for next year’s session. “The House passed the bill with an overwhelming majority, 46-23,” he said. “I expect more states will introduce similar legislation, not because of our bill to protect vulnerable children, but because it’s the right thing to do.”

So far, eight other states—Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, and South Carolina—have filed versions of the same legislation, each seeking to criminalize doctors for providing trans-affirming health care. They’ve also come to describe these proposals in similar ways: Republican state Representative Shane Sandridge named the bill he introduced in Colorado the “Protect Minors From Mutilation and Sterilization Act,” while Stewart Jones, a state representative in South Carolina, told local media that his bill was designed to “protect children” from being pressured into changing their gender.

Model legislation and recycled talking points aren’t a new trend in the United States (they also aren’t limited to conservatives), but a series of connections among bills like H.B. 1057 reveals the network of organizations and individuals at the heart of the anti-trans policy landscape and culture wars playing out nationally right now. While many pieces of anti-transgender legislation will never become law, the ones that do could have serious implications beyond the LGBTQ community, especially if a court rules that states have the right to legally create anti-discrimination exemptions through legislation.