US: Kansas state bans transgender athletes from women’s, girls' sports

The US state of Kansas is banning transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports from kindergarten through college. This is the first of several possible new laws restricting the rights of transgender people pushed through by Republican legislators over the wishes of the Democratic governor.

The Legislature on Wednesday overrode Governor Laura Kelly’s third veto in three years of the bill and came a day after lawmakers passed a broad bathroom bill. Nineteen other states have imposed bans on transgender athletes, most recently Wyoming.

The Kansas law takes effect on 1 July and is among several hundred proposals that Republican lawmakers across the US have pursued this year to push back on LGBTQ rights. Kansas lawmakers who back the ban are also pursuing proposals to end gender-affirming care for minors and restrict transgender restroom use.

The measure approved by Kansas lawmakers Tuesday would prevent transgenders from using public restrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities associated with their gender identities but also bars them from changing their name or gender on their driver’s licenses. Kelly is expected to veto it.

“I wish it was 1960, and, you know, little Johnny’s a boy and Mary’s a girl, and that’s how it is, period,” Republican state Rep. John Eplee, a 70-year-old doctor, said during a committee discussion of the bathroom bill this month.

LGBTQ-rights advocates say it’s part of a national campaign from rightwing traditionalists to erase transgender, non-binary, gender-queer, and gender-fluid people from American society.

The first state law on transgender athletes, in Idaho in 2020, came after conservatives retrenched from the national backlash over a short-lived 2016 bathroom law in North Carolina. In Kansas, conservatives’ biggest obstacle has been Kelly, who narrowly won reelection last year after pitching herself as a political centrist.

House votes 84-40 to override Governor’s veto

Conservative Republicans in Kansas fell short of the two-thirds majorities in both legislative chambers needed to override Kelly’s vetoes of the transgender athlete bills in 2021 and 2022. But this year, the House voted 84-40 to override her veto, exactly what supporters needed. The vote was 28-12 in the Senate, one more than a two-thirds majority.

Across the U.S., supporters of such bans argue that they keep competition fair. Track and field last month barred transgender athletes from international competition, adopting the same rules that swimming did last year.

With inputs from AP

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