After lawmakers in Florida started working on a bill to ban transgender women in competing against biological women in sports, ranging from elementary to college level, it has come to attention that they’re also allowing “physical examinations” if gender is questioned.
This law was presented as the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act,” which would only allow students to compete in sports with members of their biological gender. Note that this doesn’t affect transgender men, only transgender women. The original bill adds that under “certain circumstances” the school could request a physical examination of the student to identify their biological gender. According to the Tampa Bay Times, this provision was later removed and it would only be an examination of a student’s birth certificate.
The bill was first presented near the beginning of April, though it struggled to get passed by the Senate. They were struggling to agree on a way to advance it and scheduled a hearing on Tuesday, May 4, but it was postponed. Currently, the bill hasn’t been passed or signed yet, but the Governor of Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, told Fox News on April 30 that he would be signing the bill. It is still up in the air whether the senate will pass it or not.
Not only was this law proposed in Florida, but many other states have proposed and passed the law. Here in North Dakota, the law was approved by the Senate, but Governor Doug Burgam vetoed it. This was also seen in South Dakota and many other states, but states like Florida have been heavily considering the law.
Some people have said that this law would only cause more segregation between transgender and cisgender students and children. Other people argue about the biological nature of the issue, saying that transgender women have different muscle mass and abilities than biological women, even though everyone has biological differences. In an all-biological women’s sports, there will still be certain women who have longer legs to help them run faster or longer arms to help them throw further. LGBTQ advocates and people striving for gender equality find the bill unnecessary and at the very least, something that doesn’t need to be focused on right now.
There have been many other laws passed about the discrimination of transgender and non-binary people in several different states. One example of this is an Arkansas bill prohibiting healthcare for transgender youth, which was signed into law on April 13. There are still bills like this being presented and passed in many different states.
Looking into some of the history for the fight of transgender rights, it was finally recognized and allowed for transgender people to transition in the mid 1980s. Nonetheless, there has been violence and discrimination aganist transgender individuals, ranging from children and teenagers getting kicked out of their homes to being denied basic living needs, all because they don’t identify with the gender they were born as. A quick Google search can give you hundreds of examples of transgender men and women that have been mistreated.
Overall, a lot of people see this bill in different ways. Some people describe it as making sports more biologically equal and claim it has nothing to do with discriminating against transgender people. Other people recognize the history of past discrimination against transgender individuals and say that it’s a step away from gender equality.