Lawmakers return to the Gold Dome Jan. 13 and advocates and organizations are preparing for another year of anti-LGBTQ bills, including legislation targeting transgender young people.
Last year, approximately 20 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced in the Georgia legislature, including a “don’t say gay” bill targeting LGBTQ topics in schools, bathroom bans targeting trans students, a bill to define “sex” to exclude trans identities, and bills to further restrict access to gender-affirming care.
Lawmakers last year also tried to revive the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) bill. Georgia is one of only three states with no statewide non-discrimination law. If such a law is passed, LGBTQ advocates argue the religious liberty bill could create a broad license to discriminate on the basis of faith with no necessary protections against discrimination on the basis of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion or country of origin.
None of of the proposed anti-LGBTQ bills were passed into law, but Jeff Graham, executive director of Georgia Equality, the state’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, said he expects to see a return of “most if not all” of these bills this session.
“I believe in the real resiliency of the LGBTQ community,” Graham said. “I believe in the resiliency, especially of those of us who live in the South. I know that we have each other. I know that we will continue to build solid majorities of people that are behind us, but nonetheless, I worry in the short term about the impact of these political attacks on folks,” he said.
Transgender students and sports
At the top of LGBTQ advocates’ radars is expected to be a bill banning transgender students from participating in girl’s sports in high schools and colleges.
The Georgia High School Administration ruled in 2022 that athletes can only compete on teams based on their gender assigned at birth. But five recommendations released last month from the Senate Committee on the Protection of Women’s Sports includes taking away the authority of high school athletic associations to regulate participation in girls’ sports and giving it to the state legislature.
Other recommendations by the Senate committee:
- Provide protections and statutes for the protection of women’s sports in Georgia at the secondary and collegiate levels, including rules that, based on the athlete’s biological sex at birth, people assigned male at birth cannot compete in sports designated for women.
- Require schools that host or sponsor sporting events to provide separate changing and dressing facilities for male and female athletes based on their biological sex at birth.
- Provide enforcement options for rules regarding women’s sports participation and separate changing and dressing facilities, including grievance for proceedings and civil remedies for agreed participants and the authority to withhold state funding from schools that fail to abide by these rules.
- Adopt other rules as necessary to ensure that the regulation of sports is based on promoting and preserving competitive fairness and protecting student safety and that female student athletes have fair opportunities to demonstrate their strength, skills, and athletic abilities and to obtain recognition, accolades, college scholarships, and the numerous other long-term benefits that result from participating and competing in sports.
“It is indisputable that there are biological differences between men and women,” said committee chair Greg Dolezal, a Republican from Cumming, at the Dec. 13 meeting.
“Those biological differences result in men being able to jump higher, throw farther, run faster, swim faster, do a number of other things due to the increased bone density, larger lung capacity, the increased muscle mass that resulted in Title IX and the recognition that we needed to have a category that was carved out specific to women,” he said.
Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, head of the state Senate and who created the special Senate committee, said in a written statement that, “Protecting women’s sports and their rights will remain a priority in the Georgia Senate as we head into the 2025 Legislative Session.”
“The Senate continues to lead on efforts to protect women’s sports and all of the work they put into competing and becoming elite athletes … and thank [the special committee] for their work to ensure that in the future, females participating in Georgia sports are protected at any level,” Jones said.
Repercussions of anti-trans sports legislation
While the recommendations and the subsequent legislation that may be introduced are damaging enough for transgender young people, they open the door for more harm and discrimination, Graham said.
“I think that the thing that is very troubling about this has to do with banning the use of locker rooms, which could easily turn into a full bathroom ban or a ban on the use of a number of facilities,” Graham said. “So, we’re very concerned that this legislation could go further than simply who gets to play on sex-segregated teams.”
The effects of this kind of anti-LGBTQ legislation could be grave, even if not passed. According to the Trevor Project, anti-transgender laws and the rhetoric surrounding them significantly increased incidents of suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary youth by as much as 72% from 2018 to 2022.
State Sen. Kim Jackson, an LGBTQ Democrat whose DeKalb County district includes parts of Brookhaven and Tucker, said anti-LGBTQ bills only serve to distract from real issues Georgians face, including access to health care and affordable insurance, affordable housing and quality education.
“Specifically regarding the LGBTQ community, we know that some truly damaging messaging and legislation will be coming down the track during session,” Jackson said.
“I’m really hoping to move the focus away from this unnecessary fixation on the trans community. If we want to have conversations about ‘fairness in sports,’ let’s do that. Let’s talk about equity in sports across our state, from disability access to economic access to equity in girls’ sports,” Jackson said.
“Instead of continuing this harmful hyper-focus on the trans community, we need to be looking into policies that could actually help hundreds of kids across our state gain access to sports.”
Jackson said she plans to host roundtables in the new year to collect input from girls’ team coaches and athletes “so that we can really turn this into a true ‘fairness in sports’ conversation.”
Graham said he and other LGBTQ advocates hope that ant-LGBTQ bills will again fail this session. But he fears the re-election of Donald Trump, who heavily campaigned on anti-trans policies, has the potential to encourage the GOP-controlled Georgia legislature to use transgender people as a wedge issue.
“I think that just Trump winning Georgia is going to exacerbate the situation here, even though Democrats did continue to pick up two seats in the House of Representatives here in Georgia,” Graham said. “I do worry that conservatives will feel emboldened to spend a lot of time on these sorts of social issues that the LGBTQ community has borne the brunt of.”
Jamie Roberts of Atlanta is a transgender woman, attorney and activist. Trump’s anti-trans agenda helped put him back in the White House despite his own scandalous past and those in his inner circle accused of sexual assault against women, she said.
Her concerns about her humanity being the focus of federal discrimination are also being felt at the state level. Georgia lawmakers touting their intent to target trans young people and prohibit trans girls and women from competing in sports is “essentially trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist,” she said.
“There are very few trans athletes that are even competing, and even less of those compete at an elite level,” she said. “So not only is this profoundly unfair, but it is depriving trans women and girls an opportunity to compete like other kids,” Roberts said. “It’s singling out a very small and vulnerable minority of young people … and it’s extremely unfair.”
There are also no significant studies that state transgender women have an advantage over cisgender women when it comes to athletics. Roberts, an attorney, also said she would also expect such bans, if passed, would violate Title IX. Passed in 1972, the federal civil rights law ensures schools and colleges provide equal opportunity based on sex for all athletic programs.
Trans people are not a threat to cisgender people, and trans women are not a threat to cisgender women, Roberts said. In fact, transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault.
“We want the same things that everyone else does and we’re just trying to live our life the best we can,” Roberts said. “Young trans people deserve to have a happy childhood just as much as anybody else.”
