In 2019, South Dakota foreshadowed the next wave of attacks with several bills aimed specifically at trans youth, including a sports ban, a proposal to allow parents to refuse gender-affirming health treatments for their trans kids, and a bill prohibiting teachers from mentioning topics related to “gender dysphoria” until the 8th grade.
Although each of those bills ultimately failed to become law, advocates say South Dakota is often treated by other states as a “trial balloon” for anti-trans legislation; because the state is controlled by one of the country’s most conservative lawmaking bodies, Republican lobbyists use it to test the viability of inchoate legislation before those proposals are shopped around to other jurisdictions.
“Our legislators here are incredibly accessible to lobbyists,” Libby Skarin, policy director for the ACLU of South Dakota, tells Them. “Most don’t even have offices or a single staff member, and the legislature has a Republican supermajority. Our legislative session also moves incredibly quickly. You can typically get a bill passed and signed before mid-March, which means that you can spread template legislation to other states in the same year the first bill passes. We treat all the anti-LGBTQ+ bills we see as a serious threat because we know that once that first domino falls, it’s much easier for bad policy to get enacted in other states.”
Idaho was the first state to pick up where South Dakota left off. In March 2020, it became the first U.S. state to ever enact a law limiting trans youth participation in school sports, despite the fact that there were no recorded cases of a trans student competing in athletics in the state. By March 2021, more than half of the country’s legislatures introduced targeting trans student athletes, particularly trans girls, and for the first time, some of them were signed into law. After the ACLU filed a lawsuit to overturn the policy, 14 states signed an amicus brief in support of Idaho, including Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.
To date, 18 states have enacted laws banning trans youth from sports, although these efforts are beginning to slow. In December, an Ohio bill mandating student athletes compete in accordance with their “biological sex” was defeated after language requiring that sports participation be determined by genital examinations was removed from the bill. The state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, condemned the legislation, which has been voted down multiple times in various iterations.
2021-Present: Far-Right Media Enters the Chat
The tide of anti-trans legislation is in the midst of a shift once again, just as we have seen so often in the past. Amid the unprecedented focus on trans youth, far-right media platforms joined in helping to further a novel kind of hysteria centered around the bodies of trans children.
