“FLUSH the bill!” chanted protesters gathered outside Texas’s state capitol building, in Austin, on July 21st. They had gathered, bearing placards decorated with pictures of toilets, seat up, to urge lawmakers to ditch legislation that would prevent transgender people from using the lavatory of their choice.

Undeterred, the Senate voted in favour of two bills on July 25th that would reserve certain toilets, showers and changing rooms, in schools and public places, for the use of “persons of the same sex as stated on a person's birth certificate." But whether the bill will ever become law is another matter.

This is the second time this year that conservatives in Texas have tried to regulate the toilet habits of transgender people. In March, a similar bill succeeded in the state Senate but fell in the House of Representatives, thanks to opposition from pro-business Republicans. They were concerned such a law would deter investors from outside the state, as happened in North Carolina last year after its Congress passed a bathroom bill. That bill, on which Texas’s is modelled, sparked a boycott of the state by sports teams and businesses that is estimated to have cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars before the bill was partially repealed earlier this year. Concerns that Texas could suffer similarly have probably increased since then—following a decision by California’s government in June to ban publicly-funded travel to Texas on account of another illiberal measure passed by its legislature, a religious liberty law that could prevent gay couples adopting or fostering children.

Convention officials in Texas—which has three of America’s most populous cities, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio—claim the new bathroom bill has already cost them $66m in lost business. If it passes the House, they reckoned Texas could lose out on events worth $1.4bn. Other businesses, meanwhile, fret about their ability to attract and retain the sorts of footloose and discerning employees who typically do not want to live in illiberal places. IBM, one of the state’s biggest employers, has taken out full-page ads in Texan newspapers bearing the message: “No one should face discrimination for being who they are.” Corporate giants including American Airlines and AT&T have written to Gregg Abbott, the governor, warning that the bill “would seriously hurt the state’s ability to attract new businesses, investment and jobs.”

Mr Abbott seems to have been unsure what to do about all of this. At first, he was hesitant about supporting the bill; in the spring he backed a watered down version that was proposed by the House and rejected by the Senate. His prevarication is unsurprising. North Carolina’s bill did not only batter the state economically, it also sparked big political changes there. Last November, the then governor, Pat McCrory, who had signed the bill into law, lost his bid to be reelected as governor to Roy Cooper, a Democrat. Texas’s big cities, like North Carolina’s, have populations of young, cosmopolitan voters who recoil from prejudice against minorities. But Mr Abbott is now supporting the latest version of the bill and called the special session largely to discuss it.

What is behind Mr Abbott’s change of heart? Pressure from far-right Christian conservatives, is the answer. Led by Dan Patrick, the state’s lieutenant-general and a Tea Party favourite, this group has made bathroom usage a key issue ahead of primaries in 2018. Indeed, the Conservative Republicans of Texas has said it will undermine any Republican lawmaker that opposes the bill by supporting a primary challenger to them.

The fight now moves to the House, where opposition to the bill is likely to be led by Joe Straus, the Speaker, who has compared the bill (and other measures debated in the special session including anti-abortion measures) to a pile of manure. If Mr Patrick represents one side of the divide that the bathroom bill has opened up between socially conservative Republicans and moderate, business-friendly ones, Mr Straus represents the other. He was reelected to a fifth term as Speaker in January, but the Republican Party's executive committee in his home county recently endorsed a resolution calling for his removal as Speaker.

Mr Straus has cited both economic and humanitarian concerns to explain his opposition to the bill: “in order to protect our economy from billions of dollars in losses and more importantly to protect the safety of some very vulnerable young Texans”. But Mr Patrick and his backers are coming from a rather different vantage point. They believe that God is on their side in the battle against the move to recognise LGBTQ Americans and their rights.

They tend not to put it quite like that, however. Mr Patrick has argued instead that the issue is one of security; that allowing transgender people to use the bathrooms of the gender with which they identify will open the floodgates to hordes of sexual predators pretending to be transgender women so they can use the girls’ loo. He has used well-worn Republican rhetoric to explain why Texas must protect women from men dressed as women who were born men following “somebody’s wife, or somebody’s daughter” into the bathroom.

Police chiefs have been forthright in their dismissal of that argument. Standing on the steps of the capitol on July 25th before the Senate vote, Williams McManus, the police chief of San Antonio said it was important, when proposing a criminal justice concern, “to determine if you actually have a problem. This bill is a solution looking for a problem."

And even if there was a problem, such a law would be largely impossible to enforce anyway. This was illustrated by Ashley Smith (pictured), a transgender woman from Texas, who argues that a greater risk lies in making transgender women use men’s toilets. She showed the pointlessness of trying to make this law recently when she posed for a photo with a beaming Mr Abbott, who clearly had no idea that her birth certificate carried the word “male.”