Alliance Defending Freedom, America’s largest anti-LGBTQ hate group, is reportedly behind a dangerous wave of anti-trans bills.
Last year, republican Governor Brad Little signed into law the Idaho House Bill 500, the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.” This act prohibits transgender girls from competing in school sports in alignment with their gender identity. State Rep. Barbara Ehardt (R-Idaho Falls) previously confirmed that she partnered with ADF to write the bill and patterned the bill after the ADF’s own model legislation.
According to NBC News, similar legislation has been introduced in Arizona, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Georgia, West Virginia, and Oklahoma. All of the proposals reference the same section of a 2019 Washington Post op-ed, co-authored by former tennis champion Martina Navratrilova.
“The evidence is unequivocal that starting in puberty, in every sport except sailing, shooting, and riding, there will always be significant numbers of boys and men who would beat the best girls and women in head-to-head competition,” Kansas State’s SB208 quotes Navratrialova. “Claims to the contrary are simply a denial of science.”
Other common harmful language found in these bills include “the term ‘gender’ shall mean a person’s biological sex and shall be solely recognized based on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth” and the “‘inherent differences’ range from chromosomal and hormonal differences to physiological differences.”
In January, President Biden signed the Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation. This order builds on last year’s Supreme Court Bostock v. Clayton County ruling which mandated that LBGTQ people are protected from sex discrimination in the workplace. President Biden’s order calls for the Supreme Court ruling to apply to Title IX, which prohibits discrimination in federally funded schools. However, this order does not change state laws or policies that already exist meaning the ADF’s bills can fight to combat the executive order on a state level.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) oversees 24 sports at more than 1,000 colleges and universities and already has set requirements for transgender athletes. Gender confirming surgery, or legal recognition of a player’s transitioned sex, is not required in order for transgender players to participate on a team, but they require one year of hormone treatment for trans female athletes prior to competing on a women’s team.
The group’s fight for these bills comes as no surprise. In the past, ADF has fought to sterilize trans people and criminalize gay sex. They’ve also been working to push bills against trans youth for years. In 2016, anti-trans bathroom bills were introduced in Kansas, Minnesota, Nevada, and North Carolina. These bills included language from a 2014 letter the ADF sent to schools opposing bathroom access for transgender students. In 2017, bathroom bills introduced in 15 states pulled language from a piece of legislation drafted by the ADF in 2015 called the “Student Physical Privacy Act.”
After most of the restroom proposals failed to become law, the ADF moved their focus to trans participation in sports. They claim that allowing trans girls to participate in alignment with their sense of self would violate Title IX. Currently, the ADF is behind a Connecticut lawsuit seeking to prevent two Black transgender athletes, Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, from competing in women’s track and field.
According to Kasey Suffredini, CEO and national campaign director for the advocacy group Freedom for All Americans, the ADF’s interest in the subject has little to do with Title IX. “These state-level attacks are a last-ditch attempt by the Alliance Defending Freedom and other opponents of LGBTQ equality to chip away at support for all LGBTQ people,” Suffredini told them. “It is a coordinated effort to make it impossible for young transgender people to simply play on a team, make friends, and/or get the care that they need—and to reduce support for and understanding of transgender people overall.”
