The Georgia House of Representatives on Thursday adopted its own version of legislation that would limit transgender student competition in school sports, making the final passage of a law on the topic more likely after a similar bill passed the Senate earlier this month.
House Bill 267 was approved 102-54, with a couple of Democrats crossing party lines to vote with Republicans for passage. It would open schools and colleges to lawsuits for allowing transgender athletes born male to compete against girls and women.
The measure, like Senate Bill 1, which the Senate adopted in a near party-line vote the first week of February, would also prohibit transgender students born male from using locker rooms designated for females.
House Republicans called HB 276 a “common sense” measure that protects girls from more powerful transgender athletes and reinforces a binary division of the sexes.
Democrats excoriated Republicans for a “weird” obsession with a group of people who comprise a tiny fraction of the population, attributing their motive to “hate” and to pandering to conservative Christian voters.
The legislation addresses more than sports: it would replace the word “gender” with the word “sex” throughout most of Georgia’s law books.
Democrats asserted this would “erase” transgender people, removing legal protections.
“It is a calculated, dangerous, deeply discriminatory piece of legislation that goes far beyond the realm of athletics,” said Rep. Karla Drenner, D-Avondale Estates. “Let’s call this the Erasure of Transgender Georgians Act.”
Drenner called the concerns raised about transgender athletes in sport a “manufactured crisis by the most extreme factions of the Republican Party.”
Republicans said they had addressed concerns about hate crimes against transgender people with an amendment that kept the term “gender” in that part of the law.
GOP lawmakers responded to the accusation of playing politics by saying transgender athletes are a real threat to girls and women.
Rep. Ginny Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, reacted in kind to the allegation that her party was obsessed with a non-issue by saying it was “weird” that collegiate swimming champion Riley Gaines was defeated by a transgender athlete at an NCAA competition at Georgia Tech in 2022.
HB 267 is named the Riley Gaines Act because of that much-publicized incident.
“We’re just trying to keep biological males from slide tackling our daughters on the soccer field,” Ehrhart said.
Rep. Chris Erwin, R-Homer, a former school superintendent and the chairman of the House Education Committee, called it a “measured, reasonable and necessary response to growing concerns.”
Gaines testified for HB 267 at a hearing in Erwin’s committee last week. She said via Zoom that she’d learned from other women about transgender athletes dominating their competitions, too, but she didn’t go into detail.
Democrats on Thursday countered that if transgender athletes were a significant problem for female sports, Republicans wouldn’t have had to name their bill after an out-of-state athlete.
Gaines swam for the University of Kentucky.