Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee said on Wednesday that transsexual girls should be banned from playing on elementary and high school sports teams or they “would destroy women’s sports”.
“I believe that transgenders participating in women’s sports will destroy women’s sports,” said Lee, who is running for reelection next year, told reporters. “It will ruin the opportunity for girls to win scholarships. It will put a glass roof back on women who haven’t been around for a while. I think it’s bad for women and for women’s sports.”
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Lee’s comments came as Tennessee Republicans began submitting a proposal this week demanding that student athletes prove that the student’s gender matches the student’s “original” birth certificate to participate in sports in public schools. If a birth certificate is not available, parents must provide another form of evidence “indicating the student’s gender at the time of birth”.
Lee did not promise to sign the legislation if it arrived at his table, but instead reiterated that he believes that transgender athletes would put “a glass roof over women that has not been around for some time”.
Tennessee is one of a dozen states with lawmakers supporting restrictions on athletics or health care for trans children this year. The proposals come as an increasing number of athletic associations from state high schools in the United States allow transgender athletes to play in teams based on their gender identity, and the NCAA has transinclusive guidelines for all member schools.
Lawmakers debated a similar bill last year, in which the proposal passed the Tennessee House, but ended up stagnating in the Senate.
It is unclear how many transgender students are participating in sports in public schools in Tennessee.
“What a painful thing for a leader to say. There was no incident where it was a problem,” Democratic Sen. Heidi Campbell tweeted. “This is just hate legislation, and doubling down as an insult to our LGBTQ community is unnecessary.”
A leader of the Human Rights Campaign group criticized Lee’s comments as “cardboard arrogance”, saying the governor “has no interest in equity, preferring instead to foment fear and demonize children in his state”.
“Governor Lee has no idea what he is talking about,” Hope Jackson, deputy director of the national human rights campaign, said in a statement. “We would love to talk to Governor Lee if he could really name a time when a transgender athlete in Tennessee ‘stole’ a scholarship from a cisgender athlete.”
Proponents of the bill argue that transsexual girls, because they were born men, are naturally stronger, faster and bigger than women born, and therefore have an unfair advantage in sports.
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Opponents claim that such proposals violate Title IX of the federal education law that prohibits sex discrimination, as well as the decisions of the US Supreme Court and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. In addition, others point to an executive order signed by Democratic President Joe Biden that prohibited discrimination based on gender identity in school sports and elsewhere.
“I will say that this particular executive order is a tremendous exaggeration from the federal government to the states,” Lee said on Wednesday.
Currently, a similar Idaho law from 2020 has been blocked by a federal judge while a lawsuit is filed.