Following a record-breaking wave of anti-transgender legislation endangering access to health, safety and sports in 2021,​​ the South Dakota Senate has already passed a bill to ban girls and femme youth who are trans from playing sports.

Governor Kristi Noem proposed the bill, carrying on the distasteful legacy of attacking trans youth for clout for her 2022 re-election campaign – last week, she promoted the bill in a campaign self-promotional video: “In South Dakota, only girls play girls sports. Why? Because of Governor Kristi Noem’s leadership,” the ad starts.

Mainstream ‘science’ behind the ‘sex-binary’ is constructed to repress all women by non-scientific understanding that erases intersex people while gatekeeping womanhood through white supremicist-patriarchal ideas of femininity that mold cisgender women and girls into a category that needs ‘protection.’

“Noem claims she wants to ‘promote fairness in women’s sports,’ but if that were true, she’d tackle the actual threats to women’s sports such as severe underfunding, lack of media coverage, sexist ideologies that suggest that women and girls are weak, and pay equity for coaches,” ACLU of South Dakota tweeted about the legislation.

Excluding trans girls and femme youth from participating in sports has negative outcomes for trans and non-trans youth through policing of gender by invasive procedures and tests that have been used against Black athletes like Caster Semenya.

These attacks on trans youth’s right to be able to be who they are has real-life consequences: “Transgender adolescents are twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts as the general population, and they are up to four times as likely to engage in substance use. Depression and school-based victimization factored heavily into the disparities in both cases,” researchers at The University of Texas at Austin found.

Noem’s bill will now proceed to the House, where “Republican lawmakers have introduced their own legislation with the same ban but a sharper enforcement mechanism,” AP reports.

While international sports organizations like International Olympic Committee are slowly removing anti-trans barriers, last year nine states including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, passed laws preventing trans girls and femme youth from participating in sports.