Ohio House passes bill to ban trans athletes from women’s sports

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Ohio House passes bill to ban trans athletes from women’s sports

Sarthak Gupta | Institute of Law, Nirma U., IN

June 2, 2022 02:25:36 pm

Ohio’s House of Representatives Wednesday passed a bill that prohibits transgender girls and women from participating on women’s high school and college athletic teams. The Save Women’s Sports Act, HB 151, passed 56 to 28 with Democrats voting in opposition, wasn’t intended to be scheduled for legislators originally.

The original text was to amend the Ohio Resident Educator Program, assisting new teachers with mentoring and professional development in their early careers. Jena Powell, a Darke County Republican, offered an amendment to the bill based on an earlier piece of legislation she proposed last year, HB 61.

Currently, the Ohio High School Athletic Association (OHSAA), the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) regulate policies for transgender athletes to ensure medical privacy and fairness. OHSAA guidelines stipulate that transgender girls and women must have completed a minimum of 1 year of hormone treatment and/or demonstrate that they don’t possess any physical or physiological advantage over ‘genetic females.’ Equality Ohio said the text displays “a fundamental ignorance about transgender people and their participation in sports” and “attacks the Ohio High School Athletic Association and the NCAA in their ability to make policies that they deem are best for athletes.”

HB 151 would overrule these policies and institute a complete ban on transgender girls and women from playing women’s sports. The bill would require schools, state universities and private colleges to classify separate single-sex teams and sports for each sex. One of the bill most controversial provisions stipulates that a student with a “disputed” sex shall present a signed doctor’s statement clarifying their “internal and external reproductive anatomy,” testerone levels and genetic makeup. Representative Beth Liston criticized the bill and said she “strongly condemn[s] the Ohio Republicans’ policy of mandatory genital inspections for children who want to play sports.”

Powell believes allowing transgender women to play on women’s teams is a violation of Title IX, a regulation established in 1972 to prevent sex discrimination in education. In a West Virginia lawsuit over a similar bill, the US Department of Education and Department of Justice argued that Title IX “prohibit[s] discrimination against students because of their sex, including because a student is transgender.”

The Ohio Senate will consider the bill when it returns from its summer recess.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.