'Fairness in Women's Sports Act' passes in Kansas after override of Governor Kelly's veto
Article/LGBT Issues and Sports - 5 minute read
The Kansas House and Senate voted in favor of passing the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, a bill they have tried passing twice before since 2021. Each time, Kansas Governor Laura Kelly (D) vetoed the bill and each time the Kansas Legislature would fail to override the veto.
On Friday, March 17, 2023, Governor Kelly vetoed this bill once again. According to Governor Kelly, the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act only serves to “harm the mental health” of students and will “reverse the progress” made in “recruiting businesses and creating jobs.”
Nevertheless, the House and Senate voted to override Governor Kelly’s veto and for the first time in the three years of working to pass this bill, the House and Senate were able to get the necessary two-thirds majority vote needed to override the governor’s veto, passing the bill with an 84-40 vote in the House and a 28-12 vote in the Senate.
Speaker of the House Dan Hawkins (R), Majority Leader Chris Croft (R), and Speaker Pro Tem Blake Carpenter (R) issued the following statement:
“The Fairness in Women’s Sports act protects the rights of female athletes in the state by requiring that female student athletic teams only include members who are biologically female. House Republicans are united in our commitment to defending the intention of Title IX.
“We proudly stand with the female athletes across Kansas in their pursuit of athletic awards, opportunities, and scholarships and believe they deserve every chance at success afforded to their male counterparts.”
Young Democrats organizations took to twitter releasing statements regarding the issue of Kansas’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, including denouncing Representative Marvin Robinson (D-35) for being the sole House Democrat that voted in favor of overriding the veto.
Critics of the bill have framed the bill as a “transgender sports ban.” Transgender people would still be able to play on sports teams, whether those are co-ed sports teams or sports teams that align with their biological sex. This bill is also specific to trans women—biological males who transition to present as females. Furthermore, section 4 of the bill states:
“No governmental entity, licensing or accrediting organization or athletic association or organization shall entertain a complaint, open an investigation or take any other adverse action against a public educational entity for maintaining separate interscholastic, intercollegiate, intramural or club athletic teams or sports for students of the female sex.”
What this means is that a privately funded team that competes with only other privately funded teams can still have trans women play on women’s sports teams.
Davis Hammet of Loud Light, an organization that provides updates on the Kansas Legislature through a left-leaning perspective, has been fearmongering about the overriding of the veto.
This claim has led to several hot takes including the following:
An infamous case that this fearmongering comes from is the ‘Save Women’s Sports Act,’ an Ohio bill that aimed to root out 'suspected' transgender female athletes through genital inspections in June of last year. However, after receiving national backlash, the Ohio GOP got rid of that portion of the bill.
Despite widespread agreement from both the left and right that invasive genital inspections is not okay, this has become a left-wing talking point in regards to trans people in sports to create fear in otherwise rational people.
Not only is Hammet pushing this narrative, but when you read the bill the governor vetoed, it says nothing about “genital inspections.” What it does say is that it will be up to the Kansas state high school activities association and the state board of regents and the governing body for each municipal university, community college and technical college to adopt “rules and regulations” to “implement the provisions” when it comes to designating sports teams based on biological sex of student athletes. In other words, we don’t actually know how they’re going to go about determining biological sex as there’s no law being passed on how to determine it, just that biological males can’t play on or against publicly funded sports teams designated specifically for biological females.
The bill does define “biological sex” in section 2(a) as “the biological indication of male and female in the context of reproductive potential or capacity, such as sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex hormones, gonads and nonambiguous internal and external genitalia present at birth, without regard to an individual's psychological, chosen or subjective experience of gender.”
However, again, this is just a definition for “biological sex” and does not state any definitive way on how to determine sex.
Due to the House and Senate’s successful override, next semester, transgender athletes will not be able to play on girls or women’s sports teams in Kansas high schools and colleges.
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I'd get on twitter to respond to the bit about genital inspections, but I have a feeling that the guy's other posts, and the other responses to that post would just trigger me 1000 fold. And anything I say would change nobody's mind.
Amazing that he just put that out there as a fact.
I already got to the point where I posted some trollish things in comments on an article about the poor kid (patsy) that was arrested over the leaks of seriously high level military intelligence briefings. This was from a yahoo news feed, so the bit about guardsman being a gun lover and a Christian was stirring up a lot of hate. There are a nontrivial number of people on the left that would probably be OK with an order to kill all Christians in the US. Maybe over a million people. There would probably be over 10 million people that would be OK if there was some massive "usual suspects" list containing a list of people with all undesirable characteristics including being Christian, owning guns, thinking owning guns is OK. I was going to write "being a republican", but that's already available on voting rolls.