The so-called "Fairness in Womens' Sports Act” by 45 Republican representatives attempts to ban transgender girls from participating in school and college sports in Kentucky, while rewarding cisgender students with $5,000 as ‘compensation’ if they complain against trans athletes.

This is one of at least 53 bills this year, that is adding to a legacy of normalizing and encouraging hatred towards transgender folks, through tired-old stereotypes that cast a lens of deception on trans people who are living their truth.

These anti-trans sports bans disguise themselves as ‘saviours’ of women, but are practising the exact opposite.

Excluding trans girls and femme youth from participating in sports has negative outcomes for all youth. It reproduces white-supremicist patriarchal concepts of toxic masculinity that associate femininity with fragility, through a practice of systemic transmisogyny and anti-Black racism.

The sex and gender binary are social constructs that restrict everyone regardless of their gender identity, and this bill is a patriarchal gatekeeping of womanhood that creates pathways for transmisogyny to be rewarded by law.

The misinformed notion that girls who are transgender have an ‘advantage’ because of testosterone levels, ignores the double standard of how 10 percent of women have polycystic ovarian syndrome (which elevates testosterone levels) but they still allowed to play sports, researcher Jack Turban explains in the Scientific American.

“Transgender girls on puberty blockers, on the other hand, have negligible testosterone levels. Yet these state bills would force them to play with the boys,” researcher Jack Turban writes.

The harm created by this bills extends far beyond the field – 85 percent of transgender and nonbinary youth said that their mental health was negatively impacted by last year’s record-breaking legislative attacks on their identities.

There is no equity if gender is defined by patriarchal systems that are designed to restrict everyone, regardless of their gender identity. There is no equity without trans women. These bills are an attack on all youth, women and sports.

KY HB 23 was introduced on January 4th, 2022.