Georgia lawmakers plan to ban trans student athletes during 2025 legislative session

Posted by Admin December 13, 2024 Sports

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Georgia lawmakers plan to introduce legislation that will ban transgender students from competing on sports teams and using locker rooms that align with their gender identity during the 2025 legislative session, according to a Senate study committee report adopted Thursday.

The committee, known as the Special Committee on the Protection of Women’s Sports, was commissioned by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones during the 2024 legislative session. During its final meeting, an all-male panel of Republican legislators, adopted a series of five recommendations that committee chair Sen. Greg Dolezal (R-Cumming) says will improve “competitive fairness” in high school and college athletics.

“This recommendation goes in one direction,” Dolezal said. “It’s recognizing that we should not have men playing in female sports because we recognize that men are the ones that have the biological advantages.”

The recommendations include repealing the Georgia High School Association’s (GHSA) authority to regulate transgender athletes, requiring all public high schools, colleges and universities (as well as the private institutions that compete against them) to ensure students to compete on teams that align with their biological sex, and to withhold state funding from schools that refuse to comply with the rules.

“I hope that we found these hearings to be respectful,” Dolezal said. “I hope that we can recognize that we can do two things at one time. We can both treat people respect respectfully, but we can also have an eye towards fairness in the legislative process.”

Advocates for the LGBTQ community pushed back against the assertion that the committee’s recommendations constituted a fair and balanced approach to the issue. The committee’s four hearings featured testimony almost exclusively in favor of restricting trans athletes, and only included one legal expert in favor of allowing trans athletes to compete on teams that aligned with their gender identity.

“The whole process is unfair,” said Jeff Graham, the executive director of Georgia Equality. “It’s unfair to require that any group of people come before a legislative body to defend their humanity and defend their very identity.”

He also questioned whether the issue of regulating trans athletes was a good use of legislators’ time and resources. Transgender student athletes in Georgia high schools have been prohibited from competing on sports teams that align with their gender identity since 2022, when the GHSA’s executive committee unanimously voted that students must compete on the teams that match the sex on their birth certificate.

“I am appreciative of the efforts of this committee, but at the end of the day we still, after all these years, have not identified transgender athletes that are taking opportunities away from any other athlete here in Georgia,” Graham said. “And so my basic contention that this is a solution in search of a problem remains.”

The report signals a renewed focus on legislation that restricts the rights of transgender children, which became a central part of the 2024 session. Legislators in the Senate introduced a bill that would have banned doctors from prescribing puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria in transgender children, and hijacked a bill about student athlete mental health to further restrict the rights of transgender students. However, legislators in the House were reluctant to advance the legislation, and both bills died by the end of Sine Die.

This year, however, bills regulating transgender student athletes may have more success than in years past. House Speaker Jon Burns (R-Newington) said he was in support of limiting transgender athletes from competing against cisgender girls, but declined to endorse other legislation on transgender youth.

Still, the statewide and national conversation around transgender rights has LGBTQ advocates in Georgia worried about what the 2025 session may bring.

“We are anticipating that this is the beginning of another rough legislative session for the LGBT community very broadly, but very, very specifically to transgender Georgians,” Graham said, adding, “we were successful in defeating everything last year. We will work as hard as we possibly can to show the humanity of the transgender community.”

Maya Homan is a 2024 election fellow at USA TODAY who focuses on Georgia politics. She is @MayaHoman on X, formerly Twitter.