Similar to Tennessee, although West Virginia has already imposed a law banning transgender girls and femme athletes, the state is not satisfied with its extent of transphobia.

Five Republican Delegates are sponsoring a bill that prevents schools that have public funding, from participating with schools that are affirming towards trans youth athletes, through a violent imposition of the unscientific ‘sex binary’ that is detrimental to all youth.

The bill reduces children to their bodies, by policing athletes on the basis of an insignificant piece of paper: “A school shall not accept any birth certificate for purposes of participation in an athletic or sporting event that has been revised or amended,” the bill states, in its attempt to further dismiss trans and intersex athletes.

It uproots additional barriers for intersex athletes by invasively requiring them to go through “genetic testing” – procedures that have perpetuated gender essentialism, misogyny and anti-Black racism against athletes like Caster Semenya.

Schools that create affirming spaces for trans and intersex athletes, will no longer be eligible to recieve public funds if this bill is signed into law.

These bills are against science: they carry on the institutional erasure of intersex people through their unscientific and baseless claims about dividing young athletes in line with a ‘sex binary’ that has never existed.

They encourage cisgender youth to discriminate against trans youth, and endorse state-sanctioned transmisogyny, which is increasingly putting children at risk for being who they are – 85 percent of transgender and nonbinary youth said in a poll, that their mental health was negatively impacted by last year’s record-breaking legislative attacks on their identities.

WV HB 2141 is active.