Tell Me That They Are Not Doing It For Spite.

Something like 41 states have anti-trans bills before their legislature including Connecticut with three bills.

The question is why? Why all of sudden this rush of bills?

Lawmakers can’t cite local examples of trans girls in sports
AP
By David Crary and Lindsay Whitehurst
March 3, 2021


Legislators in more than 20 states have introduced bills this year that would ban transgender girls from competing on girls’ sports teams in public high schools. Yet in almost every case, sponsors cannot cite a single instance in their own state or region where such participation has caused problems.

The Associated Press reached out to two dozen state lawmakers sponsoring such measures around the country as well as the conservative groups supporting them and found only a few times it’s been an issue among the hundreds of thousands of American teenagers who play high school sports.

So there are no trans athletes in most of the states, then why the bills?

In South Carolina, for example, Rep. Ashley Trantham said she knew of no transgender athletes competing in the state and was proposing a ban to prevent possible problems in the future. Otherwise, she said during a recent hearing, “the next generation of female athletes in South Carolina may not have a chance to excel.”

In Tennessee, House Speaker Cameron Sexton conceded there may not actually be transgender students now participating in middle and high school sports; he said a bill was necessary so the state could be “proactive.”

Many of them cited Connecticut and the two trans athletes.

Supporters of transgender rights say the Connecticut case gets so much attention from conservatives because it’s the only example of its kind.

“It’s their Exhibit A, and there’s no Exhibit B -- absolutely none,” said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights and a prominent trans-rights attorney.

What about the Connecticut case?

Well right now it is in the judge’s court and judging news reports.

Inclusive Policy for Trans Athletes Spurs Tense Arguments in Connecticut
The hearing came two days after the Biden administration dropped support of a Title IX suit from female athletes who say it’s unfair to make them compete against transgender girls.
Court House News
By Nina Pullano
February 26, 2021


[…]
The hearing came days after the Biden administration withdrew government support from the Title IX suit, brought by three athletes who say they are at a biological disadvantage if forced to compete in races, including home state championships, against trans girls.

Arguing on their behalf, attorney Roger Brooks with Alliance Defending Freedom focused largely on the differences between gender identity and the sex someone is assigned at birth.
[…]
ACLU attorney Joshua Block pointed out that Title IX does not specifically require separate sports. The statute says girls must be allowed to participate in boys’ sports, or else be provided with a comparable alternative.

In the same Connecticut schools that are being sued, there is one co-ed team for ice hockey, which Block noted is a contact sport.

Block said that no court has ever defined equal access to sports as “winning an equal number of trophies.”

Which brings us to North Carolina where a girl won the Boy’s State Wrestling Championship! She played on the boy’s team because there are no girls wrestling teams in the state. Gee… the boys have been quite about wrestling a girl.

The AP article pointed out that…

One of those girls, Chelsea Mitchell, defeated Terry Miller -- the faster of the two trans sprinters -- in their final two races in February 2020.

Not only that but both of the plaintiffs received a full sport’s scholarships and the ACLU lawyer for the defendants pointed out there was no harm done by the defendants… both girls got scholarships and one of them won a track meet against the defendants.

So that brings us back to the original question, why have all these states have introduced anti-trans legislation? There maybe a clue in the AP article.

The ADF and others like it are the behind-the-scenes backers of the campaign, offering model legislation and a playbook to promote the bills most of them with common features and even titles, like the Save Women’s Sports Act.

Another clue, the Southern Poverty Law Center list the Alliance Defending Freedom as a hate organization.

The SPLC lists ADF as a hate group because it has supported the idea that being LGBTQ+ should be a crime in the U.S. and abroad and believes that is OK to put LGBTQ+ people in prison for engaging in consensual sex. It has also supported laws that required the forced sterilization of transgender Europeans.

ADF has spread lies about the LGBTQ+ community. It has, for example, linked being LGBTQ+ to pedophilia and claimed that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy society. ADF tries to couch its rhetoric in benign-sounding phrases, but the truth is that it works to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and restrict their rights for being who they are.
[…]
Anti-LGBTQ hate groups, like ADF, often try to justify their opposition to LGBTQ+ rights with rhetoric and harmful pseudoscience that demonizes LGBTQ+ people as threats to children, society and, often, public health.

Hmm…

The Alliance Defending Freedom fits right in the Republican anti-LGBTQ+ ideology.