On Monday, more than 400 LGBTQ and civil rights groups told lawmakers to reject a bill that would stop transgender athletes from playing women’s sports. They said the bill, which the House is likely to consider this week, “would hurt women and girls and undermine civil rights for all students.”
The letter, which was written by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an umbrella group of U.S. civil rights organizations, says that keeping transgender and gender-nonconforming teens from playing sports at school across the country will make an already vulnerable group of teens feel even more alone and judged.
The letter says, “If schools treat some students as outcasts, they create a space where no student feels safe or included.”
The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act was brought up again by Republicans last week. It would change Title IX, the federal civil rights law that forbids sex discrimination at schools and education programs that get government money, so schools can’t let transgender female athletes take part in sports or activities “designated for women or girls.”
This says that sex is “based only on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”
In the House, Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) is the main author of the bill, and in the Senate, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) is in charge of introducing it. In the last Congress, both men pushed for the same bills, which had mixed results.
Steube’s bill was first passed by the House in 2023, and it will likely be looked at again on Tuesday. A rules package passed earlier this month says that passing the bill is one of the top goals for House Republicans in the new Congress. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) put the measure on the Senate calendar last week, which means it will be up for a vote in the next few weeks.
The bill has the support of 97 Republicans in both the House and the Senate. These Republicans say that the bill is needed to keep women’s sports fair and to protect female players who are not transgender from getting hurt.
An religious Christian group called Concerned Women for America asked Congress to pass the bill in a blog post on Friday. The group sued the University of Pennsylvania in 2022 for letting transgender swimmer Lia Thomas participate on the college’s women’s team. They said that policies at public schools that allow transgender athletes to compete are “federally funded discrimination.”
The Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, and Advocates for Trans Equality all signed the letter on Monday. It calls people who support the bill “wolves in sheep’s clothing” whose “agenda is not about the rights of women and girls.”
The letter says, “Even though the authors of the legislation say they are looking out for the interests of cisgender girls and women, this legislation does not address the longstanding barriers all girls and women have faced in their pursuit of athletics.”
As women athletes have been asking for decades, the bill doesn’t give transgender people similar facilities, equipment, and travel. Instead, it hides an attack on transgender people as an issue of athletics policy.
The letter says that the vague language in the bill and its “intrusive focus on scrutiny of students’ bodies” will make it impossible for cisgender women and girls with intersex traits (natural differences in sex traits that are different from what is usually considered male or female) to play sports at school and will “invite scrutiny and harassment of any other student perceived by anyone as not conforming to sex stereotypes.”
People who are against similar laws that have been passed in more than twenty states say that they will only make people wonder if female athletes look feminine enough to play women’s sports without having their gender called into question.
In a Facebook post last year, a former member of the Utah state school board made false claims that a 16-year-old athlete in her area is transgender. This led to a lot of threats on the student’s social media accounts.
In 2022, the Utah High School Activities Association said it had looked into a high school athlete’s gender because parents thought the student, who is not transgender, might have broken a state law that says transgender athletes can’t play women’s sports.
In October, a school district in Oregon asked Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) campaign to take down two ads that were mean to transgender athletes because they used pictures of two girls who are not transgender and whose parents did not give the campaign permission to use the pictures.
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