Background
As of June 2023, the Equality Federation identified 72 bills introduced to ban transgender students from athletics consistent with their gender identity around the United States, up from 29 such bills introduced in 2022. As of November 2023, the Map Movement Project reported 24 states banned transgender students from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity. Antitransgender sports legislation often requires that all students be on sports teams and compete in sports competitions based on their gender assigned at birth. These efforts assume that transgender girls—often framed as cisgender boys claiming to be girls—hold biological advantages in girls’ sports, effectively undermining fairness in sports. These efforts have not been met without opposition. In addition to local and national grassroots movements, the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal, and the Human Rights Campaign have filled lawsuits across the U.S. opposing antitransgender student athletics legislation.
Activists posit that antitransgender athletics efforts are also motivated by anti-Blackness in that they reflect long-standing gendered racist discrimination toward Black women for being deemed “too masculine” (Clifton, 2021). Without conclusive evidence that transgender girls are “biologically male,” this policy and legislation stands on antitransgender accusations that have disproportionately been used to discriminate against Black women in the U.S. and abroad.
Antitransgender sports efforts increasingly emerged following the high-profile cases of Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, two Black transgender high school girls competing in girls’ track teams in Connecticut. Despite having previously defeated Yearwood and Miller, three White cisgender girls were plaintiffs in a February 2020 lawsuit that argued that transgender girls’ participation in girls’ sports competitions violates protections against gender-based discrimination under Title IX (Clifton, 2021). In April 2021, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit.