Idaho’s transgender athlete ban has been on hold pending a federal court case for two years. Now we know how lucky Idaho’s female athletes have been.
Our neighbor to the south, which briefly implemented a ban modeled on Idaho’s before it, too, was blocked by a federal court last week, has shown us a cautionary tale about how abusive this policy will be toward girls if it’s ever implemented in Idaho.
Youth sports have a tendency to bring out the worst in some parents. And as the Salt Lake Tribune detailed shortly before the injunction went into effect, parents in Utah had already begun using the state’s trans athlete ban to try to give their kids an edge.
Last year, David Spatafore, spokesperson for the Utah High School Activities Association, testified that the organization had received and investigated multiple complaints in the first year, generally “when an athlete doesn’t look feminine enough,” the Tribune reported.
In a recent case, one girl won by a wide margin. The families of both the second- and third-place finishers challenged the gender of the winner. After an intensive investigation, it was found the winner was born a girl.
This is significant because Idaho’s trans athlete ban works by the same mechanism — allowing literally anyone to challenge the gender of an athlete — as Utah’s.
That’s not surprising because Rep. Barbara Ehardt, R-Idaho Falls, crafted Idaho’s transgender athlete ban with the aid of a group called the Alliance Defending Freedom — whose mission is to strip rights from the LGBTQ community. Idaho’s law then became the template that many other states based their bans on.
But while in the case of Utah’s ban, the investigation consisted of looking back at school records, Idaho’s mechanism of proving sex is far more invasive.
Idaho’s law allows only three ways to demonstrate biological sex: examination of genitalia, testosterone testing and chromosome testing. Chromosome testing costs hundreds or thousands of dollars. Depending on the type of testosterone testing required, it too can be highly expensive.
So the only option for many families will be a genital examination. This will be a permanent option for second- and third-place finishers: challenge the winner’s gender, and force her to decide between an invasive physical examination and losing her victory.
The simplest description of such a legal regime is “child abuse.”
That abuse — which will predictably begin if the law is allowed to take effect — is the most important reason the Idaho Legislature should repeal the trans athlete ban during the next legislative session.
But there’s another: Legislatures are the worst body imaginable to be in charge of this question. They revisit laws infrequently, with many decades often passing between revisions to a section of code — the Legislature finally got around to repealing the law regulating dueling in 2015.
Most lawmakers lack the technical sophistication to read scientific studies, and the scientific literature about the effects of gender transition on athletic performance is still emerging and not well developed.
Take one example: Let’s speculate that compelling evidence emerges that trans female endurance athletes may require less time on hormone therapy to be fairly competitive in the female division compared to power athletes. We don’t know that this is true, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is.
What kind of regulation might make sense in that case? Maybe trans female cross country runners should be allowed to compete after six months of hormone therapy, while trans female weightlifters need two years of hormone therapy.
Know who’s terrible at parsing through detailed questions like these and updating the rules in response to emerging research? Lawmakers.
That’s why the detailed rules of sports competitions — the length of a football field, the weight divisions in wrestling, concussion protocols, etc. — aren’t set out in state code. They’re defined by sports regulatory bodies, who are much more competent to deal with them.
Lawmakers should repeal the trans athlete ban during the next legislative session, returning the authority over this question to groups like the Idaho High School Activities Association and the NCAA. They are far more capable.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman based in eastern Idaho.
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