A Georgia Senate study committee that bills itself as tasked with protecting women’s sports met Thursday for the last time before it is set to release recommendations before next year’s legislative session, and transgender Georgians are bracing themselves.
At Thursday’s hearing, transgender women and allies argued that vanishingly few transgender women participate in school sports, and those who do are largely not at the top of the competitive heap. Many said the national focus is making life difficult.
“It’s so hard to face this kind of opposition,” said Aaron Baker, a transgender woman and activist. “It’s so hard to be at a hearing like this and hear the language. It’s so hard for you to hear people describe me as a biological man because it’s not true. I am hormonally female, I’m phenotypically female, I’m psychologically female, and that is a gross oversimplification of who I am and my identity, and it hurts.”
Committee Chair Greg Dolezal, a Cumming Republican, told members he would spend the next week or so reviewing testimony from the committee’s three hearings and plans to announce the date for presenting recommendations shortly after. Study committee recommendations could take the form of proposed legislation in time for the 2025 General Assembly, which is set to begin Jan. 13.
Dolezal indicated he is interested in considering regulations for college sports. A previous hearing featured testimony from cisgender women college swimmers who said they were placed at an unfair disadvantage when they had to compete against a transgender woman at a competition at Georgia Tech.
“A few years ago, I believe it was three years ago, the General Assembly passed a bill essentially prescribing the control to make decisions around transgender participation in sports to the Georgia High School Association, they passed a resolution that stated that participation in sports, high school sports, in the state of Georgia was based on the sex prescribed on a birth certificate. The law is currently silent on the collegiate competition level. So right now, we just have a law as it relates to high school associations,” he said.
Other Republicans on the committee suggested they would like to see legislation in K-12 schools, especially surrounding restrooms and locker rooms.
“As a father of two young daughters, we’ve got to protect women,” said Gwinnett Republican Sen. Clint Dixon. “We’ve got to protect their sports, we’ve got to protect them in changing rooms from what we heard from many of those athletes who testified, four or five of them who testified in the first committee hearing, having to change, which took 20, 30 minutes at a time, in front of a transgender female, but still had the genitalia of a male, which was horrific for them to witness that, some of them ended up changing in a storage closet, some of them waited until that athlete left the room, having to miss some of their competition, and that’s just at the college level, we’re not even talking about minors in K-12.”
Some activists indicated that they would oppose any kind of restriction on transgender participation, while speakers like Lambda Legal attorney Sasha Buchert urged the lawmakers to take a nuanced approach over a blanket ban, which could mean a committee including medical experts to consider safety or competitive concerns on a case-by-case basis. Others said such decisions should be left to athletic associations and leagues rather than politicians or political appointees.
“Sports are already managed by expert organizations like the NCAA, the International Olympics Committee and professional leagues,” said Delfina Booth, a former Georgia Tech student and high school athlete who said she has lost transgender friends to police violence and suicide.
“These governing bodies have developed policies over decades that analyze fairness based on unique needs of each sport,” she added. “Contact sports have different rules than non-contact sports, children’s sports focus more on teamwork and development than adult sports, et cetera. These nuances cannot be addressed through broad government legislation. Additionally, decisions about athletic ability involve multiple complex factors, including the signs of physical development and the specific demands of each sport. These aren’t matters that lend themselves directly or easily to blanket rules.”
This story was provided by WABE content sharing partner the Georgia Recorder.
