On HB2 anniversary, new NC bill joins a national push to restrict transgender athletes
On the fifth anniversary of state lawmakers passing HB2, Republican legislators gathered again at the North Carolina General Assembly to push a new bill involving transgender people.
“This bill seeks to promote an absolute truth, which is that gender identity at birth counts,” said Rep. Jimmy Dixon, a Duplin County Republican, during a press conference Tuesday.
The “Save Women’s Sports Act” would keep transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams in school. It’s unclear if that has happened in North Carolina, although the N.C. High School Athletic Association has a framework in place to allow for it.
This bill, however, would put a stop to that.
The bill’s lead sponsor, Republican Rep. Mark Brody of Union County, said he’s not aware of any controversies involving transgender girls playing on girls’ sports teams. But it’s only a matter of time, he said, unless the legislature stops it now.
“I do not want to wait until biological females are pushed out of female sports, and all their records are broken and scholarships are lost,” Brody said.
Groups that advocate for LGBTQ rights, however, say the bill is nothing more than an attempt to harass. Equality NC called the bill “inappropriate” and “outdated” and said there’s no reason schools couldn’t balance the tasks of keeping sports competitive and respecting transgender students’ rights.
“It’s beyond disheartening to see that the North Carolina General Assembly has not learned the lessons of five years ago,” Rebby Kern, the education policy director at Equality NC, said in a press release. “Young people all across this state, regardless of gender identity, deserve the opportunity to experience the benefits of being part of a sporting community — especially when trans youth already face disproportionate barriers to success in learning environments.”
A feminist pitch?
The bill, House Bill 358, is largely similar to other bills introduced in 30 states. The founder of a national “Save Women’s Sports” movement, Beth Stelzer, came to the legislature Tuesday to promote it.
Stelzer is a competitive power-lifter and said her “shero” is Jennifer Thompson, a North Carolina math teacher who has won multiple world championships in power-lifting. But even after Thompson dedicated many years to becoming one of the strongest women on earth, Stelzer said, “it has taken only two years for her teenage son, at her same body weight, to reach her records.”
So she doesn’t want to keep men’s and women’s sports separate because she hates transgender people, Stelzer said. She just wants competitions to remain fair and equal for biological women.
“We have the data to show that male competitive advantage over females is 64%,” she said, later adding: “Scientific studies continue to confirm that even after hormone replacements, male bodies do not lose these advantages.”
Versions of this bill in Idaho and Mississippi have already become law, and versions in South Dakota and Arkansas have passed the legislatures there but haven’t yet become law.
Transgender athletes in NC
In North Carolina, under current high school athletics rules, transgender girls who want to join a girls’ sports team or transgender boys who want to join a boys’ team would have to submit an application to the NCHSAA, which oversees high school sports in the state, proving that they’re transgender.
That could include proof that they have been living their daily life as the gender with which they identify, as well as things like medical reports or medications associated with their transition.
Under the current rules, the request is to be approved only if a high school sports committee “finds that the student genuinely identifies as the gender indicated.” Other schools are allowed to challenge the decision if they thought there had been fraud. But the NCHSAA says on its website that challenge process is likely to happen only “in very rare circumstances” and that coaches and others could be punished if they use those challenges simply to harass their opponents.
Those rules went into place only recently and had input from many people and groups — including Allison Scott, the director of impact and innovation at the Campaign for Southern Equality.
Scott, a transgender woman from Asheville, said in an interview Tuesday she wasn’t out in high school, so she never personally faced the problem of which team to play on. But her group helps many kids who are going through those struggles now, she said, and she questioned why the legislature is targeting them.
Especially, she said, since they did it on the anniversary of House Bill 2. HB2 was the wide-ranging 2016 bill that required people in schools and other government buildings to use the bathroom matching their birth certificate, banned cities and counties from passing any pro-LGBTQ discrimination protections, and more.
“It’s on the anniversary of a very traumatic and painful day for trans people in North Carolina,” Scott said. “... And it shows, to me, a real lack of empathy from lawmakers.”
While Brody said the lack of any examples of transgender girls playing girls’ sports shows that the bill is being proactive, Scott said to her it looks more like conservative activists inventing a problem to rile up their base.
“There’s no evidence that anything is going on to warrant these attacks,” she said. “It’s just painting a target on trans kids’ backs and trying to ‘other’ them.”
Charlie Rae of Raleigh joined the bill’s sponsors in their news conference Tuesday and said she had gender dysphoria as a child. The Mayo Clinic defines gender dysphoria as “the feeling of discomfort or distress that might occur in people whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth.”
Rae said she thought she should’ve been a boy for much of her childhood, but then when she was in middle school and started playing sports and going through puberty, she realized she had been mistaken.
“I thought that I was born in the wrong body,” Rae said. “Having access to all kinds of sports, thanks to Title IX, helped me and other women grow into our bodies.”
Title IX is a piece of federal civil rights law that created protections against gender-based discrimination. A large part of its legacy is the proliferation of women’s sports in colleges and high schools. Rae said she’d be concerned that if transgender women are allowed to play women’s sports, a women’s team could be made up of biological men, shutting biological women out of opportunities to play, all without violating Title IX.
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This story was originally published March 23, 2021 at 6:49 PM with the headline "On HB2 anniversary, new NC bill joins a national push to restrict transgender athletes."
