Transgender sports ban passes N.C. Senate

The North Carolina Senate passed its version of a bill that would exclude transgender female athletes from middle and high school sports Thursday. The bill is less expansive than the similar House version passed Wednesday, which includes college sports. The Senate version also does not prohibit female athletes from playing on teams designated male, while the House version says that will be allowed only if there is no comparable female team.

Senate Bill 631 passed on a party line vote, 29-18, with three Senators having excused absences — Val Applewhite (D-Cumberland), Gladys Robinson (D-Guilford) and Warren Daniel (R- Buncombe).

The Senate bill now moves over to the House, with a reconciled final version of one of the bills likely to head to Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk. With the GOP now enjoying a veto-proof supermajority in both chambers of the General Assembly, the bill could be the first of a series targeting transgender youth to become law, with or without the governor’s signature.

“Here we go again, waging culture wars on the backs of children,” said Senator Natalie Murdock (D-Durham) during the floor debate in the Senate on Thursday. “This is an intentional distraction and does not solve the problems facing families in North Carolina every day.”

Murdock and Sen. Jay Chaudhuri (D-Wake) each offered amendments to the bill which would have, among other things: prohibited the inspection of genitals to verify a student’s gender, prohibit anyone convicted of a sexual crime from participating in sports covered by the bill or from being a coach, codify the North Carolina High School Athletics Association’s current review process for transgender athletes, create a statewide mental health grant program and prohibit “conversion therapy,” a scientifically discredited practice that seeks to “cure” LGBTQ people.

Republicans voted down those amendments, insisting that the bill is not part of a national wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation.

“This bill has nothing to do with other bills that are running that maybe have some similar content,” said Sen. Kevin Corbin (R-Cherokee). “There’s bills all over the United States. This bill has nothing to do with any of those. This bill is a bill by itself — it’s about women’s sports. It’s about fairness in women’s sports. It has nothing to do with the bills that deal with sexual preference or sexual identity. This has nothing to do with that. This is about keeping biological males from playing women’s sports. That’s it. This is a commonsense bill.”

Debating science, gender, facts and history

But Democrats and LGBTQ advocates said Republicans’ very refusal to refer to transgender women as anything besides “biological men” indicates a commitment to rejecting transgender identity, as does casting them as threats to both the safety and integrity of women’s sports.

“I will say a transgender woman is a biological man — that’s the science,” said Sen. Joyce Krawiec (R-Forsyth).

“Girls and women are not physically capable to compete against men,” Krawiec said, pointing to Lia Thomas, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer who became the first transgender woman to win a national NCAA Division 1 title.

Since her win, Thomas has been the face of conservative fears over transgender women in sports, with opponents often exaggerating her prowess and athletic dominance.

“She swam for three years on the male team,” Krawiec said of Thomas during the Thursday’s floor debate. “Competing against males, she was ranked 554th in the 200 meter freestyle. Yet when she swam against the women, she crushed them. She beat them by laps in the pool.”

Thomas’s actual performance was much more mixed, with victories that were seconds, rather than laps, ahead of cisgender competitors — when she beat them at all.

Swimmers in the U.S. actually swim in yards during the school year, not meters. In November of 2021, her performance in the 200 yard freestyle broke records for her school but was still short of the record to that point in the NCAA 2021 season — which was set by a cisgender woman. Even in that performance, she was about six seconds faster than her nearest competitor, who was a teammate.

In March of last year, when Thomas qualified for her second final at the NCAA championships, she entered the preliminaries tied for third fastest time in the country with two cisgender women. Two cisgender competitors posted better times in the 200 yard event during that competition and another tied Thomas.

In the 500 yard freestyle event Thomas actually won last year for her first Division 1 title, she finished 1.75 seconds ahead of her nearest competitor and more than 9 seconds behind the record set by Katie Ledecky, a cisgender woman, in 2017.

Kraweic was not the only Republican lawmaker to exaggerate or misstate the dominance — or even participation — of transgender women in sports.

“Look back at the history of our Olympics and our country,” said Sen. Jim Perry (R-Beaufort). “We have men’s sports and women’s sports. Only in two areas I can think of today do they really compete each other — equestrian, where they’re all riding a horse that’s doing the work and maybe shooting. But we have them divided to have fair competition.”

In fact, the history of the Olympics offers many and varied examples of mixed-sex competition — even before the question of transgender athletes competing. Since women were introduced into the modern Olympics in 1900, women they have competed with men in not just equestrian sports and shooting (which was gender-segregated in 1992) but also in croquet, sailing and motor boating as well as mixed doubles tennis, table tennis, badminton, curling and mixed-team Alpine skiing.

More directly to the question of competition offered by transgender women, the International Olympic Committee has allowed transgender athletes to compete at the highest level of international athletic competition since 2003. In that time, only one transgender woman has risen to the level of actual competition — New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard in 2021. Despite concern about her genetic advantages and presumed dominance, Hubbard was bested by cisgender women, failing in her first three lifts.

Public sentiment, questions of morality

Perry was correct in another of his observations, however.

He cited a 2022 Pew Research Center study which found that only a small percentage of Americans oppose proposals that would require transgender athletes to compete on sports teams designated for the sex they were assigned at birth. That study found 58 percent of respondents supported such proposals, 17 percent opposed them, and 24 percent neither favor nor oppose them. Pew found views on the question — and all of its questions surrounding transgender issues — deeply divided by party.

The Pew study appears to document a step back in American sentiment since conservative politicians and media have made transgender people — and especially transgender youth — central to their political campaigns and rhetoric. In 2021 a PBS/NPR/Marist poll found 67 percent of respondents, including 66 percent who self-identified as Republicans, said they opposed laws that would bar transgender athletes from playing on sports teams that align with the gender with which they identify.

LGBTQ advocates say the question is a moral and ethical one, not one of whether a majority today supports the rights of an extreme minority.

“We are saddened, enraged and exhausted by the persistent attacks on our communities,” said Kendra Johnson, executive director of Equality NC. “We know that this does not represent our state and that this is not what North Carolinians want for the LGBTQ+ community.”

“We also know that it will harm the mental and physical wellbeing of our kids by depriving them of the many benefits that sports have to offer,” Johnson said. “We stand in solidarity with the queer and trans kids who have borne the brunt of these targeted legislative attacks. We will keep fighting to build a state and a country where LGBTQ+ kids are safe and celebrated.”

Though the U.S. House passed its own bill barring transgender women from women’s sports Thursday, the measure doesn’t have support in the U.S. Senate and would face a veto if it reached President Joe Biden’s desk.

Cathryn Oakley, State Legislative Director and Senior Counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, pointed to the Biden’s administration proposal of a rule affirming that Title IX protects transgender students from discrimination in athletics. Categorical bans would be a violation of federal law under the new rule. But the administration did not close the door on restricting access to sports teams for transgender youth, saying “in some instances, particularly in competitive high school and college athletic environments, some schools may adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation.”

If a categorical ban becomes law in North Carolina, Democratic lawmakers and LGBTQ advocates have warned, it could run afoul of federal courts in the same manner as a similar law recently did in West Virginia. But the damage done to the state’s reputation could be longer lasting, they said.

“North Carolina will never move past its reputation for anti-transgender discrimination if it continues these legislative attacks on the transgender community,” Oakley said. “Women’s sports face many real challenges, including chronic underfunding, unequal pay, lack of access and harassment and abuse of athletes. None of those challenges are addressed by attempts to prevent transgender children from playing school sports alongside their friends. Yet again, the General Assembly is choosing to discriminate rather than legislate on the real issues facing North Carolina. Yet again, it is going back to the well of discrimination to rile up an extremist base.”