In the weeks after North Carolina’s Republican-led state legislature passed its infamous 2016 “bathroom bill” — banning transgender people from using the bathroom aligned with their gender — major companies and their CEOs tripped over themselves to denounce it.

PayPal canceled its planned expansion into North Carolina. The NCAA pulled its seven tournaments from the state. And 68 companies, including Apple, Yelp, American Airlines, and Nike, signed an amicus brief with the Obama-era Department of Justice denouncing the law.

Late last month, the Texas Legislature passed its own, inarguably harsher, version of the “bathroom bill.” But in the first year of a second Trump administration hellbent on targeting the trans community, those corporate crusaders have been notably quieter.

The Intercept reached out to 59 of the companies whose names appeared on the amicus brief in 2016 — the other nine had gone out of business, been acquired by larger corporations, or spun off into separate subsidiaries — to get their thoughts on the Texas bill.

Their response: crickets.

Except for Affirm and TD Bank, which both declined to comment, none of the corporations responded to our inquiry or issued prominent public statements against the bill.

“The rise and fall of corporate support for things like LGBTQ rights and representation shows how weak corporations’ support for LGBTQ rights is,” said Joanna Wuest, an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University.

Wuest, who has been researching corporate support for LGBTQ rights since 2020, said that she used to find........

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