Tennessee bill would finally protect girls sports teams from boys identifying as female
By Ben Marquis, The Western JournalPublished December 26, 2019 at 11:53am
Over the past few years, as the LGBT advocacy crowd has incessantly pushed transgender acceptance on the broader American populace, a rather disheartening result of that movement has come into focus.
"Transgender females" -- boys or men who identify as female -- have been engaging in and dominating girls' and women's sports.
#Transgender sprinters finish 1st, 2nd at Connecticut girls indoor track championships washingtontimes.com/news/2019/feb/…
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That is a problem that threatens to undermine the very idea of women's athletics, despite protests to the contrary from LGBT advocates or pandering progressive politicians
-- and now somebody is seeking to do something to address it.
The Tennessee Star reported that a bill has been proposed in the Tennessee General Assembly that would require student-athletes at elementary and secondary schools to compete in sports against competitors of their own sex at birth, not whatever gender they claim.
That bill is HB 1572, and it was submitted by state Rep. Bruce Griffey.
Notably, the legislation places the onus for compliance on the schools and school officials and wields public funding and fines for officials as punishment for non-compliance with the requirement.
The measure reads:
"Each elementary and secondary school in this state that receives any type of public funding from this state or a local government, or both, shall require, for an official or unofficial school-sanctioned athletic or sporting event, that each athlete participating in the athletic or sporting event participates with and competes against other athletes based on the athlete's biological sex as indicated on the athlete's original birth certificate issued at the time of birth."
Violations of that requirement would result in the loss of public funding for the school from state and local government, which could be restored only after an investigation determined the school was fully in compliance.
Furthermore, school officials found to have "willfully and intentionally" violated or worked to circumnavigate the requirement would be subject to a civil lawsuit and a fine of up to $10,000, and be barred from holding public office or working in a school's administration for five years.
HB1572 by The Western Journal on Scribd
In a statement provided to The Star about his bill, Griffey noted that vast differences in how boys' and girls' bodies develop are a fundamental biological truth that can't be changed, and how that disparity places biological females at a great disadvantage to biological males competing against them.
"We are seeing more and more transgender athletes competing and posting victories in traditionally gendered sports competitions, and doing so to the detriment of girls and women biologically born female," Griffey said.
"Boys and men, due to testosterone levels, bigger bone structure, greater lung capacity, and larger heart size, have physical advantages in sports relative to girls and women," he rightly noted.
The state legislator added that it was "fundamentally unfair" to force girls to compete against, and consistently lose to, boys claiming to be female.
Griffey said his bill was in direct response to a federal measure put forward by the Democrat-controlled U.S. House, the so-called Equality Act, that would add gender identity and sexual orientation as protected statuses under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In theory, that proposed federal law would force schools to allow boys claiming to be female to compete in girls' sports, lest the schools be charged with discrimination and punished accordingly.
"With House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushing through passage in the U.S. House of Representative HR 5 -- the Equality Act
-- that, among other things, creates a civil right for male athletes to self-identify as females in sports competitions, I believe it is important for states to take a stand," Griffey told The Star.
"This is what I seek to do through the filing of House Bill 1572."
Thus far, the Republican-controlled Senate has declined to take up the Democrat-passed HR 5, and it seems unlikely that it will ever receive a vote.
Regardless, it is good that Tennessee is stepping up to proactively guard against such a measure.
Hopefully, other states will follow suit and put an end to the unfair transgender nonsense before it destroys girls' and women's sports.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
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