Arizona has joined the growing tally of states considering legislation that would bar young athletes from competing in sports as the gender with which they identify.
Announced on January 21 by Republican state representative Nancy Barto, who has described the bill as the “Save Women’s Sports Act,” the proposal seeks to limit participation in women’s sports at the elementary, high school, and collegiate level to those who were assigned female at birth. According to the legislation, which has already drawn the support of at least 22 other members of the Arizona House of Representatives, students would be able to change their gender designation from male to female only through a sworn doctor’s statement detailing the student’s “internal and external reproductive anatomy” and “normal endogenously produced levels of testosterone.” The bill would also allow students to file lawsuits against schools if they feel they’ve been put at a competitive disadvantage, or lost opportunities because of a transgender person’s participation.
“Female student-athletes should not be forced to compete in a sport against biological males, who possess inherent physiological advantages. When this is allowed, it discourages female participation in athletics and, worse, it can result in women and girls being denied crucial educational and financial opportunities,” the lawmaker said in a statement.
Barto’s proposed policy has been met with immediate backlash from members and advocates of the LGBTQ+ community. Some, including Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, have noted a larger trend of using legislative attacks on trans youth to sow electoral division. “There have been no problems with this issue in Arizona. This isn’t responding to an issue that students are having in Arizona. This is a national campaign to use this issue — sadly — to just polarize and divide people,” Minter told USA Today. “This is just about attacking transgender kids for political reasons.”
Others, such as pioneering trans athlete Chris Mosier (who recently became the first openly transgender man to compete in a men’s Olympic Trial), have called out the bill for its invasive, patently transphobic nature. “Lawmakers in Arizona want to inspect ‘internal & external reproductive anatomy’ of high school transgender student-athletes to prevent trans girls from competing with girls, where they belong,” the Hall of Fame triathlete tweeted. (It should be noted that while “sex-testing” has yet to be considered so prominently at the state level, it has been a constant and devastating component of women’s sports for years — one that, moreover, has largely and oppressively impacted intersex athletes.)
Arizona is just one of at least eight other states in the process of considering legislation aimed at banning trans women and girls from playing sports and being on teams as the gender with which they identify. According to Freedom for All Americans, a group that tracks anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, lawmakers in Alabama, Indiana, Georgia, Missouri, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Washington, and West Virginia have all filed bills that seek to bar student athletes’ from competing as a gender other than that which they were assigned at birth. Several of these bills specifically target trans women and girls.
According to the Associated Press, these measures are part of a national campaign led by the Scottsdale-based Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-wing, faith-based lobbying organization. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the ADF as a hate group that has “supported the recriminalization of homosexuality in the U.S. and criminalization abroad; has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; has linked homosexuality to pedophilia and claims that a ‘homosexual agenda’ will destroy Christianity and society.”
Chase Strangio, a transgender activist and lawyer with the ACLU, contextualized Barto’s proposed legislation, along with other bills designed to limit trans athletes’ access to youth sports, within a broader constellation of anti-trans proposals sweeping the nation. “It is hard to imagine why state legislators have decided to prioritize barring transgender young people from sharing in the benefit of secondary school athletics or disrupting medical treatment consistent with prevailing standards of care,” Strangio told AP. “But here we are, the start of the session, a time to fight.”
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