Gov. Tate Reeves (R), governor of Mississippi, signed a bill Thursday to ban transgender athletes from competing on girls’ and/or women’s sports teams.
What We Know:
- Mississippi is the first state to enact such a ban after a federal court blocked an Idaho law last year. MS Senate Bill 2536 becomes law July 1, although a viable legal challenge is possible. More than 20 states have proposed restrictions on athletics or gender-confirming health care for transgender minors this year. GOP lawmakers are responding to an executive order by President Joe Biden that bans discrimination based on gender identity in school sports and elsewhere. Biden signed the legislation the day he took office.
- The Mississippi Senate passed SB2536 on February 11th, and the House passed it March 3. The votes were mostly along party lines, while democrats mostly voted against the bill or did not vote at all. Mississippi GOP legislators who pushed the bill gave no evidence of any transgender athletes competing in Mississippi schools or universities.
- Alphonso David, president of the LGBTQ civil rights organization Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement Thursday that the Mississippi law could lead to more bullying of transgender people. A transgender-rights attorney with the ACLU, Chase Strangio, said the bill “is very vague and seemingly unenforceable.”
“Unfortunately, there is already rampant discrimination against trans youth in Mississippi, which means people are already driven out of sport,” Strangio said.
- In December 2020, the British Journal of Sports Medicine published a study that suggested transgender women maintain an athletic advantage over their cisgender peers even after a year on hormone therapy by Dr. Timothy Roberts. Roberts began investigating the athletic performance of transgender men and women while in the Air Force,
“For the Olympic level, the elite level, I’d say probably two years is more realistic than one year,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Timothy Roberts, a pediatrician and the director of the adolescent medicine training program at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. “At one year, the trans women on average still have an advantage over the cis women,” he said, referring to cisgender, or nontransgender, women.
-
- Reeves signed “the Mississippi Fairness Act” into law, requiring the state’s schools to designate teams by the sex assigned at birth and prohibiting transgender student-athletes from participating in school sports in accordance with their gender identity. The governor has been vocally in opposition against transgender rights.
I will sign our bill to protect young girls from being forced to compete with biological males for athletic opportunities.
It’s crazy we have to address it, but the Biden E.O. forced the issue. Adults? That’s on them. But the push for kids to adopt transgenderism is just wrong. https://t.co/sncpaPlTbZ
— Tate Reeves (@tatereeves) March 4, 2021
- Bills similar to the Mississippi bill often argue that transgender girls, as they were assigned male at birth, are naturally stronger, faster, and bigger than those assigned female. Opponents say such proposals violate not only Title IX of federal education law prohibiting sex discrimination but also rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
