SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Transgender girls in Utah will be allowed to participate in women’s sports as the school year begins after a judge on Friday overturned a ban pending legal challenges from parents.
Instead of an outright ban, transgender girls will go before an appointed state board, which will decide on a case-by-case basis whether they are eligible to participate. The commission was created in a law passed earlier by Utah’s Republican lawmakers as a fallback plan in the event of an injunction against the law.
According to the law, the jury can ask for and evaluate the child’s height and weight to make decisions, whether a transgender girl would have an unfair advantage. The committee, which will meet in the coming weeks, will include a medical data statistician, a physician with expertise in gender identity health, a sports physiologist, a mental health professional, a collegiate athletic trainer, an athletic association representative and an alternate. In each case, the member who is a coach or official in the sport concerned.
The Utah ruling marked the court’s latest development in the nationwide debate over how to navigate a flashpoint problem.
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At least 12 Republican-led states — including Utah — have passed laws banning transgender women or girls from sports on the grounds that it gives them an unfair competitive advantage. Transgender rights advocates say the rules aren’t just about sports, but another way to denigrate and attack transgender youth. Similar cases are happening in states like Idaho, West Virginia and Indiana.
Utah’s ban took effect in July after the state’s Republican Legislature overrode a veto by Gov. Spencer Cox, also a Republican.
Utah state judge Keith Kelly said in the ruling that attorneys representing the families of the three transgender student-athletes who brought the suit showed they had suffered great distress “by being singled out for inappropriate treatment as transgender girls.”
The transgender girl and her parents filed the lawsuit last May, alleging that it violates the due process and rights guarantees of the Utah Constitution.
The ruling was exciting news for the girls and their families, said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Lesbian Rights Center.
“The pressure, the strain, it was putting on them was tremendous,” Minter said. “It’s a great relief to lift that weight.”
Utah state Sen. Stuart Adams, a Republican, said in a statement Friday that the committee will now make decisions “to protect fair and safe competition while maintaining the integrity of women’s sports.”
Minter said he is hopeful the board will make fair decisions, keep the process confidential and come up with a good solution. He hopes the committee will only act as a safety net, believing that transgender girls can play if there are no obvious issues with the fairness of the competition.
“How it’s done is very important,” Minter said.
The ruling comes after the Utah High School Activities Association revealed this week that it secretly investigated a female athlete — without telling her or her parents — after receiving complaints from the parents of two girls she beat in competition, questioning whether the girl was transgender. The association and the girls’ high school determined she was a female after reviewing her school’s records from kindergarten, association spokesman David Spatafore told lawmakers this week. He said the girl and her family were not informed of the investigation to avoid embarrassment and to “keep the matter private,” the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
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Gov. Cox said Thursday at his monthly press conference that complaints about the girl investigated by parents had crossed a line.
“My goodness, we live in this world where we’ve become sore losers, and we’re looking for some reason to lose our children,” he said. He said he supports fairness in sports, but that “allegations like this are quite disturbing to me.”
Spatafore declined to release the student’s grade, school or sport to protect his identity. He said the student and his family were not informed of the investigation because it could be offensive to them and that parents would be contacted “if necessary.”
Spatafore also said the association has looked into other complaints about transgender athletes in its efforts to comply with Utah’s law, which took effect in July. Some complaints are “when an athlete doesn’t look feminine enough,” she said. Not a single complaint has been verified.
Before the ban, Utah had registered a transgender female athlete who competed on a high school girls’ team last year, Spatafore said.
