Utah’s legislature on Friday overrode Republican Governor Spencer Cox’s veto on a bill that gatekeeps sports by banning transgender girls and femme youth athletes, adding it to the list of 11 states with similar laws.

Cox explained his veto in a letter citing the risk of suicide amongst trans youth, the baseless fear-mongering behind anti-trans bills, and the financial impacts that Utah schools would face because of it.

In the whole state of 75,000 high school athletes, only four trans children are participating in sports: “Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live,” Cox writes.

While most news outlets are focusing on the compassion that’s unheard of when it comes to Republican lawmakers, it’s important to address the letter’s gender essentialist undertones used against Pennsylvania’s national champion swimmer Lia Thomas. And how these gender essentialist tones continue to echo in the Olympic Committees decision to support Utah’s bid to bring another Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City.

Both Cox’s and the Olympic committee’s intentions seem to come from a place of wanting to support trans youth – but they’re still not quite there.

By continuing the misinformed narrative about trans athletes ‘dominating women’s sports’ or that their participation is a ‘complex’ situation, Cox and the Olympic committee continue to share forms of transmisogyny.

These bio-essentialist ideas perpetuate white supremicist-patriarchy that molds cisgender women and girls into a category that needs ‘protection’, reproducing the idea of associating femininity with fragility through toxic masculinity that casts cisgender men as superior to all.

Moreover, these arguments are against the ‘sex-based’ science they cite: Genes, gonads, and hormones keep sex subject to change – “The truth is, your biological sex isn’t carved in stone, but a living system with the potential for change,” Neurobiologist Dr. Simón(e) D Sun writes in the Scientific American —Continued..