Article
Courtesy of The Orlando Sentinel
By
Gray Rohrer
Published May 1, 2021
TALLAHASSEE — In an 11th-hour maneuver, Republicans on
Wednesday night revived and approved a bill to ban transgender females from
competing in girl’s and women’s sports, sending it to Gov. Ron DeSantis’
desk as the legislative session hurtles toward a scheduled end Friday.
A standalone Senate transgender 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 a charter school bill 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 the House by a 79-37 vote, mostly along party lines. After a
nearly two-hour, emotional debate, the Senate approved the measure by a
23-16 vote shortly before 9 p.m.
“If they want to play, let them play, there’s nothing to stop them,” said
Sen. Victor Torres, D-Kissimmee, who has a transgender granddaughter. “We
thought it was dead, but obviously some don’t care.”
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.”
Several Democrats blasted the bill, saying it would hurt transgender
students in schools, as well as the maneuver to put it on another bill,
eating up time in the last three days of the session as the state continues
to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’ve spent more time on this amendment than we have on unemployment in the
Senate,” said Sen. Jason Pizzo, D-North Miami Beach. “How many tens of
thousands of our constituents have died in the last year? ... This is so
completely unnecessary to the good hard work our constituents want us to
do.”
Sen. Kelli Stargel, R-Lakeland, defended the measure as protecting female
athletes from unfair competition from transgender women.
“I thought it was common knowledge that men are stronger than women,”
Stargel said. “We’re just trying to protect them.”
A similar bill in Idaho was struck down by a federal judge last year.
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,” an implied threat to states that approve the
bills.
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.
|