State: Texas · Statute: Tex. Penal Code § 48.02 · Filed by The Bureau of Real Laws
In Texas, it is illegal to sell your own eye. Of all the "weird Texas laws" in circulation, this one is usually filed as a punchline — proof that legislatures ban things nobody was doing anyway. Read the statute and the joke curdles: this is a serious anti-organ-trafficking law, it names the eye expressly, and as of September 1, 2025, breaking it is a felony.
Texas Penal Code § 48.02 is titled "Prohibition of the Purchase and Sale of Human Organs." Subsection (a) defines "human organ" as "the human kidney, liver, heart, lung, pancreas, eye, bone, skin, or any other human organ or tissue." There it is, fifth in the lineup: eye. (Hair and blood are specifically excluded from the definition, which is why selling your hair remains a lawful, if humbling, transaction.)
Subsection (b) makes it an offense to knowingly or intentionally offer to buy, offer to sell, acquire, receive, sell, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration. Note the verbs: you don't have to complete a sale. Listing your eye for sale is itself the crime — the state arrests the advertisement, not just the surgery.
Subsection (c) draws the line the whole statute turns on: donation is legal, commerce is not. Fees paid to physicians and hospitals, reimbursement of legal or medical expenses, and reimbursing a donor's travel, housing, and lost wages are all excepted. You may give an organ away and get your bus fare back. You may not sell one. The moment a price tag appears, so does the Penal Code.
Texas added § 48.02 in 1985 (Acts 1985, 69th Leg., ch. 40, effective August 26, 1985), one year after Congress passed the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984. The federal law, codified at 42 U.S.C. § 274e, bans buying and selling human organs affecting interstate commerce — and its definition, too, names the "eye," alongside cornea, because eyes and corneal tissue are genuinely transplantable and genuinely trafficked. Texas was building the state-level fence right behind the federal one.
For forty years the Texas offense sat at Class A misdemeanor grade — serious, but modest. Then the Legislature revisited it. A 2023 bill, SB 436, proposed raising the penalty on findings that trafficked organs account for a meaningful share of transplants worldwide and that sellers are often misled or coerced. The increase finally landed in 2025: SB 456, enacted by the 89th Legislature, amended § 48.02(d) to make a violation a state jail felony, effective September 1, 2025, and added a requirement (Occupations Code § 164.0571) that a physician who knowingly uses an illegally obtained organ lose their license.
So the famous claim is true, and recently became truer. Texas will not let you sell your eye — not as a goof, not as a side hustle, not at any price. Keep it. You'll need it to read the rest of this site.
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