Louisiana officially banned transgender women athletes from competing in any women’s sports after the state’s Democrat Governor Edwards declined to take executive action on the legislation.
Louisiana is the 18th state to pass a law banning biological males from participating in women’s sports.
NEW: Louisiana has BANNED biological males from competing in girl’s sports with Governor John Bel Edwards allowing it to become law without his signature.
Louisiana is the 18th state to protect our daughter’s sports.
— American Principles
(@approject) June 7, 2022
SB 44 or “Fairness in 16 Women’s Sports Act,” which requires all participants of women’s sports to be “biologically female” and gives them the ability to sue in case of violations, has passed the Senate by a vote of 32-6-0 and moves to the desk of John Bel Edwards last May 25.
The Democratic governor allowed the bill to pass without his signature or veto the bill.
“It was obvious to me after two years it was going to become law whether or not I signed or vetoed the bill,” Gov. Edwards said at a news conference Monday night.
“Whether it’s intended or not, the effect is to [send] a strong message to at least some of these young people that they shouldn’t be who they think they are, who they believe they are, who they know that they are,” Edwards said.” I find that very distressing. I do believe that we can be better than that.”
Far-left CNN wasn’t happy with the news:
Gov. John Bel Edwards’ decision not to veto or directly approve SB 44 means that his state’s Republican-led legislature succeeded in passing the ban nearly a year after the governor had killed a similar version of the legislation last June, calling it discriminatory. Per state law, the governor needed to take direct action on the legislation before Monday in order to have a say in its fate.
Louisiana now joins a growing list of states that have enacted such bans in recent years, including at least six in 2022 alone. In pushing such measures, conservatives have argued that transgender women and girls have physical advantages over cisgender women and girls in sports, though a 2017 report found “no direct or consistent research” on any such advantage.
Louisiana’s law, titled the Fairness in Womens Sports Act, is like many of the other bans passed by Republican-led states this year and in 2021. It requires all public schools and some private schools that receive state funding to designate sports teams based on “biological sex,” thus prohibiting trans women and girls from participating on women’s athletic teams.
The law defines “biological sex” as “a statement of a student’s biological sex on the student’s official birth certificate which is entered at or near the time of the student’s birth.”
While sex is a category that refers broadly to physiology, a person’s gender is an innate sense of identity. The factors that go into determining the sex listed on a birth certificate may include anatomy, genetics and hormones, and there is broad natural variation in each of these categories. For this reason, critics have said the language of “biological sex,” as used in this legislation, is overly simplistic and misleading.
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