Arizona House passes bill banning female trans athletes from girls’ teams

On Tuesday, the Arizona House banned transgender student athletes from participating on teams that align with their gender identity. All 31 Republican representatives supported the bill, which now moves on to the state Senate.

The bill requires that students whose gender is in dispute undergo genetic testing; the prerequisite only applies to those who want to be on female teams. Democrats managed to kill two other test requirements, one of which had led to them calling the proposal the “show-me-your-genitals bill.”

“Anyone who cares about making sure that … women are playing on a level playing field wants to see a bill that that’s going to clarify that women will have that going forward in Arizona,” Rep. Nancy Barto, the sponsor of the bill, told the Arizona Capitol Times. “We want to make sure that my granddaughters and their offspring, that the future of Arizona has women’s sports in its future.”

Not mincing words, Barto said, “Biological males are not women. The differences between males and females is common sense. Our bone structures are different. Men are stronger.”

Democratic Rep. Isela Blanc called the measure “completely inappropriate” before Tuesday’s debate, according to Tucson’s KVOA station. “We’re talking about kids in sports that range in athletic ability, height, weight, age. And it’s all to go after transgender girls. It makes no sense. It’s completely wrong, inhumane, unkind, inappropriate, and just mean-spirited.”

Democratic Rep. Daniel Hernandez pointed out the obvious: “Just by virtue of being a male does not mean that someone is better at sport. I, objectively, am not better at sports than people like Serena Williams.”

There has been a “new wave” of anti-transgender legislation across the country, according to Zein Murib, an assistant professor of political science at Fordham University in New York. It comes after “a national backlash derailed most state efforts to enact ‘bathroom bills’ that would require people to use sex-segregated facilities that correspond to the sex on their birth certificate,” they said.

In the past month alone, conservative legislators in Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, and Ohio have also introduced bills that would ban transgender students from participating in female sports.

Carmarion D. Anderson, Alabama state director of the Human Rights Campaign, told The Associated Press that the proposal in Alabama stigmatizes people for something that has not even ever been a problem. Few people identify as transgender and “not all of them are interested in playing sports and even fewer of them are elite level.”

“This bill targets transgender and gender non-conforming youth, which is discriminating, plain and simple,” Anderson said. “Transgender people are people. Transgender men are men. Transgender women are women.”