FILE – Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin speaks as Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, right, Arkansas Attorney General Nicholas Broni, second from left, and high school athlete Amelia Ford, left, listen to a news conference about a lawsuit challenging new regulations aimed at protecting the rights of transgender students in schools, May 7, 2024, in Little Rock, Arkansas. The new federal regulations protecting the rights of transgender students have sparked lawsuits from Republican states that argue they require states to allow transgender athletes to compete on school teams. (Associated Press Photo/Andrew DeMillo, File)
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — The Biden administration has put on hold plans to ban a blanket ban on transgender athletes on school teams in an election year in which Republicans are rallying around restrictions on transgender youth, but GOP state leaders are trying to make sure voters know the issue is still on the table.
At least 24 Republican-majority states have filed lawsuits over a separate federal regulation meant to protect the rights of transgender students, which they say would require the government to allow transgender girls to play on girls' teams.
The rules they are challenging don't specifically mention transgender athletes. Title IX, the landmark law enacted in 1972 to regulate women's rights in schools and universities that receive federal funding, also prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Republicans are now trying to focus on sports, appealing to parents' and players' sensitivities about competitive fairness. They are enlisting student-athletes to sign on as plaintiffs and appear with the attorney general at a press conference announcing the lawsuit.
States argue that the new rules would allow schools to force transgender athletes to compete on teams that align with their gender identity, even if the rules don't explicitly state that. They may have a point.
“This new rule makes it pretty clear that there can't be a rule that says if you're transgender you can't participate,” said Harper Seldin, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who has represented transgender athletes in an unrelated lawsuit.
He hopes that specific sports-related regulations will back that up, but said that's not yet clear.
Advocates for transgender athletes say the Republicans' arguments are rooted in politics rather than reality and are aimed at weakening lawsuits challenging state restrictions on transgender athletes.
“It's baffling that they're trying to challenge a rule that doesn't do what they claim to be opposing,” said Kathleen Oakley, senior director of legal and policy at the Human Rights Campaign, a leading LGBTQ+ advocacy group. “It's hard to imagine how they can expect to be taken seriously when they don't know what the rule they're challenging is.”
And many transgender young people and their families say such restrictions unfairly put transgender athletes at risk. Eric Cole Johnson, a New Hampshire father who opposed the proposed ban, said his daughter's ability to compete in cross-country running and Nordic skiing had enabled her to thrive.
“My daughter is not the devil. She is not a threat,” Cole Johnson told a state Senate committee in April that was considering a bill now on Republican Gov. Chris Sununu's desk. “Transgender girls are not a threat.”
New Hampshire is not among the states challenging the rule. Republicans have filed challenges in several federal circuit courts in hopes of blocking the new rules before they go into effect in August. Several states, including Arkansas and Oklahoma, have also said they will not follow the rule.
The White House initially planned to include a new policy that would have prohibited schools from banning transgender athletes outright, but it was shelved in what was widely seen as a political move to avoid controversy ahead of this fall's elections. The Education Department said it received more than 150,000 comments on the sports policy but did not say when the rule would be released.
The lawsuit, filed by Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, said the lack of sports guidance in the rules that go into effect instead is “misleading” given the department's default position that Title IX does not permit discrimination on the basis of sex.
Many states that challenge the rule also have laws on the books that impose restrictions on transgender athletes, the restrooms and locker rooms they can use and the pronouns they can use at school — policies that could be overridden by the rule.
“I don't think girls should lose their right to play on a level playing field or have a safe place to change,” said Amelia Ford, a high school basketball player from Brookland, Arkansas, and plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the rule in federal court in Missouri.
In the debate about transgender people participating in sports consistent with their gender identity, each side points to limited research to support their position on whether transgender women and girls have an advantage over cisgender women and girls.
Some say the debate over the fairness of school sports doesn't seem as widespread, given the relatively small transgender population (about 2.74% of 13- to 24-year-olds nationwide, according to an estimate by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law) and the small number of transgender people participating in sports. Many of the lawmakers who have pushed for sports bans have not cited examples from their own states, pointing instead to a handful of high-profile cases in other states, such as that of swimmer Leah Thomas.
When Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an executive order refusing to comply with the latest Title IX regulations, former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines chimed in. Gaines was one of more than a dozen college athletes who sued the NCAA for allowing Thomas to compete in the 2022 national championships.
The lawsuits come as Republican states seek to get the U.S. Supreme Court to decide restrictions on transgender athletes. West Virginia is appealing a ruling that allowed transgender athletes to compete on middle school teams. A ruling by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last month found that the ban violated students' rights under Title IX.
“Many of these lawsuits are premature and seek to undermine the basic notion that transgender students are protected under Title IX and continue the same exclusion we've seen in states across the country when it comes to sports,” said Paul Castillo, an attorney with Lambda Legal.
___
Associated Press writers Jeff Mulvihill in New Jersey and Seungmin Kim in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
