TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — In an 11th-hour maneuver, Florida House Republicans on Wednesday revived a bill to ban transgender females from competing in girl’s and women’s sports, attaching the measure to a larger bill dealing with charter schools as the legislative session hurtles toward a scheduled end Friday.
A standalone bill, SB 2012, appeared to have died earlier in the session when the Senate failed to pass it out of its final committee hearing, preventing it from getting to the floor in that chamber.
But Rep. Kaylee Tuck, R-Lake Placid, sponsor of the original House bill, amended it onto SB 1028, which has become a standoff between the House and Senate in the session’s final days. The Senate earlier on Wednesday stripped out a provision added by the House to impose term limits on school board members.
The bill passed by a 79-37 vote, mostly along party lines. It was sent over immediately to the Senate, which quickly began debate.
That chamber will have to decide whether to pass the bill as is or remove the transgender provision and risk “bouncing” it back to the House, a move which could kill the remainder of the bill.
Tuck and supporters of the bill have argued it is needed because transgender women have an unfair competitive advantage in athletic competitions.
She fended off criticisms from Democrats that high school and college sports in Florida haven’t had an issue with transgender women in sports, and some transgender girls already playing sports would be kicked off their teams.
“We don’t need to wait until there’s a problem in Florida for us to act,” Tuck said.
Democrats and LGBTQ activists pilloried the move, which came late in the afternoon and dragged the House floor session into the evening.
“Despite hearing the voices of trans kids and their families time and time again, extremists in the Legislature have made it their mission to make trans children pawns in their culture war,” Gina Duncan, director of transgender equality of Equality Florida, an LGBTQ rights advocacy group, said in a statement.
Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, was angered that Tuck presented her amendment as a compromise because it addressed some of the concerns raised by Democrats to the original bill.
The original measure had a dispute resolution clause that allowed schools to conduct medical inspections of a student athlete’s genitals suspected of being a biological male, but the amendment would instead rely on an original birth certificate to verify the gender of an athlete.
“We are told it’s a compromise because we’re no longer inspecting the genitals of children in schools,” Smith said. “Members, not inspecting children’s genitals is not a compromise. The fact that we were doing it in the first place is absolutely insane.”
A bill similar to this one passed in Idaho last year and quickly landed in court where a federal judge ruled that the state could not ban transgender females from female sports teams. Idaho’s law is now on hold during appeals, but similar bills have been passed in several other states, and they have been introduced in more than 25.
The NCAA said recently it would only look to hold its championships in states that are “free of discrimination” and said its policy is based on “inclusion and fairness.”
The NCAA has several championship events scheduled in Florida in the coming year, including tennis in Altamonte Springs, golf in Howey-in-the-Hills and Orlando, volleyball in Tampa, rowing in Sarasota, and cross country in Tallahassee.
______
