Tennessee Will Be Latest State to Defend Banning Transgender People From School Sports
Tennessee is the latest state that will be forced to defend its law banning transgender students in high schools or middle schools from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity, the Associated Press reported. The American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee and LGBTQ civil rights advocacy group Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit against the measure in the U.S. District Court in Nashville.
The lawsuit, submitted on behalf of a 14-year-old transgender boy, alleges that the Tennessee law breaches the equal rights safeguards in Title IX and the 14th amendment. The legislation prevented Luc Esquivel, a freshman at Farragut High School in Knoxville, from being able to try out for the boys golf team, according to the suit.
Esquivel said in a news release that being "singled out" in the law "crushed me."
"I just want to play, like any other kid," he said.
A slew of similar Republican-driven bills were also passed in other states this year and before. Idaho's and West Virginia's laws, both of which only block participation from transgender athletes on female teams, were blocked by federal judges, the AP reported.
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.
According to the Human Rights Campaign, 10 states now have enacted sports bans aimed at transgender athletes: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and South Dakota, where the governor used executive order powers.
Tennessee's Governor Bill Lee helped fuel the bill's progress early on, saying in February that allowing transgender girls to play on middle and high school sports teams would "destroy women's sports." In March, lawmakers passed the bill and Lee signed it. Over the next few months, Tennessee became a leading state in passing legislation aimed at transgender people.
Tennessee's new laws this year also restrict bathroom options in public schools for transgender people, require notices outside public bathrooms at businesses and government buildings that let transgender people use the bathrooms of their gender identity, let parents opt students out of public school lessons on sexual orientation or gender identity, and ban doctors from providing gender-confirming hormone treatment to prepubescent minors, though advocates say doctors there already don't do that.
The bathroom signage requirement remains blocked by a judge while a federal lawsuit proceeds. Tennessee is defending against a federal lawsuit over the school bathroom restriction, which puts schools at risk of losing lawsuits if they let transgender students or employees use multiperson bathrooms or locker rooms that do not reflect their sex at birth.
Lawmakers who brought the slew of transgender sports bills this year, meanwhile, struggled to cite any problems by transgender athlete participation in their states.
Legislation targeting transgender people has prompted outcry from prominent opponents, including the business community. But so far, there has been little in the way of tangible repercussions for those states, particularly compared with when North Carolina's Legislature passed a bill in March 2016 limiting which public restrooms transgender people could use, prompting a swift and powerful backlash. The NBA and NCAA relocated events; some companies scrapped expansion plans. By March 2017, the bill's bathroom provisions were repealed.
