North Dakota governor signs bill banning transgender girls from female-designated sports teams News
© WikiMedia (Ted Eytan)
North Dakota governor signs bill banning transgender girls from female-designated sports teams

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum Tuesday passed two bills, HB 1249 and HB 1489, prohibiting transgender girls from playing on female-designated intercollegiate or intramural teams.

The bills mandate that sports teams must designate teams as female, male or coed and require that teams designated for females may not be open to students assigned male at birth. Additionally, the bills define sex as “the biological state of being female or male, based on an individual’s nonambiguous sex organs, chromosomes, and endogenous hormone profile at birth.”

In February, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) condemned a series of North Dakota bills “targeting the existence of transgender and non-binary people.” In response to several anti-trans bills passing the North Dakota House of Representatives, HRC’s State Legislative Director and Senior Counsel Cathryn Oakley stated:

The legislation that the House has passed is both terrifying and outrageous: it prohibits kids from receiving age-appropriate, medically necessary health care simply because they’re transgender, puts transgender people at risk of additional discrimination by making it harder to obtain identity documents that reflect who they really are, and forces them to use sex-segregated spaces where they will experience harassment and potentially violence.

Last week, the North Dakota House failed to override Burgum’s veto of a bill that would restrict the treatment of transgender students in the state’s grade schools. These bills come a week after the Biden administration released a proposed federal rule that would prohibit schools from “banning transgender students from participating on teams consistent with their gender identity.” These bills would likely conflict with the proposed federal rule.