by Ty Tagami | Feb 10, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Senate Republicans commandeered legislation involving nurses Tuesday and refashioned the measure as a ban on transgender services for youth.
The move under Georgia’s Gold Dome triggered an hour of by-now familiar debate, with Democrats opposed and Republicans in favor. That is how the final vote went, as well, with the heavily amended House Bill 54 passing 30-18 along party lines.
When the bill passed the House unanimously last year, on the final day of the legislative session, it was about nurses and home health care. When the clock reset this year, the second half of the biennial assembly of lawmakers, it was sitting in the Senate and ripe for the taking.
So, on Tuesday, the Senate took the bill, and changed it to its core, using it as a vehicle to prohibit puberty blockers and other interventions for youth experiencing gender dysphoria.
Afterward, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a Republican running to be Georgia’s next governor, said Senate Republicans had stood with the majority in acting “to protect our youth.” He added that he “will always fight for Georgia values and the safety of our kids.”
Democrats dismissed the amendment as an election year ploy to grab attention.
“This is a real easy playbook for you all to run, but I want you to know, maybe it worked in 2024, I think voters are tired of it,” said Sen. Josh McLaurin, D-Sandy Springs, who is running to succeed Jones in the lieutenant governor’s office.
The measure now returns to the House, where the original version dealing with nurses was backed by House Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones, R-Milton, the second-ranked member of that chamber.
by Ty Tagami | Apr 28, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Transgender students born male can no longer participate on female teams in Georgia’s schools and colleges now that Gov. Brian Kemp has signed a ban passed by the General Assembly.
On Monday, Kemp inked his signature on seven bills, including the Riley Gaines Act of 2025. It is named after a Kentucky college swimmer who lost to a transgender competitor at an NCAA competition held at Georgia Tech three years ago.
“This commonsense legislation is about what is fair and safe for our children,” Kemp said.
House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington, said the issue is not partisan. Rather, he said, “it’s about right and wrong.”
The House of Representatives backed a similar bill, but Senate Bill 1 emerged as the final version. Burns and the top Republican on the Senate side, Lieutenant Gov. Burt Jones, made it a top priority. Jones, a potential candidate for governor, did not attend the bill signing ceremony, but said in a written statement that Georgia lawmakers had kept a promise to female athletes, “Just like President Trump is delivering on promises made in D.C.”
In early February, Trump signed an executive order affecting schools and transgender athletes. His “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” order withholds federal funding from schools that do not “oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports … as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.”
Critics contend Georgia’s Senate and House measures were overkill, a massive effort against rare instances of transgender participation in sports. But proponents, including Frontline Policy Action, a fundamentalist Christian advocacy group that helped draft them, argued that allowing transgender students born male to compete against females was both unfair and dangerous, given the variance in physical strength.
Despite hours of testimony, no evidence was presented of instances in Georgia’s elementary or high schools where a significant problem was caused by transgender participation. Critics noted that lawmakers named their legislation after a college athlete from another state.
Georgia now joins more than two dozen states with a similar prohibition.
The law applies to any competitions that involve public schools and colleges and includes participating private schools and colleges. It allows the state to financially punish institutions that willfully fail to comply, including withholding direct funding as well as funds for scholarships, loans and grants. It also allows lawsuits and monetary damages against such institutions.
The law also prohibits transgender athletes born female from participating on male teams, though there was no significant testimony about problems caused by their participation in sport.
Kemp also signed House Bill 268, a sweeping school safety measure that requires that routinely updated digital campus maps be shared with first responders, that schools equip staff with mobile panic alerts and that student records be transferred within five business days of a student’s change of schools. It would also allow children ages 13-17 accused of committing a terroristic act on campus to be tried as an adult, with potential prison time and convictions that would go on their records for life.
Kemp also signed House Bill 81, to enter an interstate compact on licensing school psychologists; House Bill 235, to give school staff time off to donate organs; House Bill 307, for screeners and support plans for students with dyslexia; Senate Bill 82, to encourage school districts to authorize charter schools, and Senate Bill 123, to address chronic absenteeism.
by Dave Williams | Mar 31, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Controversial legislation banning transgender student athletes from participating in female sports in Georgia cleared the Republican-controlled General Assembly Monday.
Senate Bill 1, which the Senate’s GOP majority passed early last month, passed the House 100-64 virtually along party lines early Monday afternoon. The Senate then gave the bill final passage several hours later, voting 34-20 also along party lines to approve several changes the House had made to the measure.
The legislation prohibits Georgia public school and college students from competing on teams that do not match the sex on their birth certificates. It also applies to private institutions that compete against public schools and colleges.
Noncompliant public schools would risk loss of state funding and exposure to lawsuits.
During Monday’s House floor debate, Republican supporters said transgender students born male enjoy an unfair competitive advantage over women in sports to the point of threatening female athletes’ safety.
“It is a narrowly tailored commonsense bill that eliminates the potential for male advantage,” said Rep. Josh Bonner, R-Fayetteville, who carried the Senate legislation in the House. “Allowing that advantage on the field puts females at risk.”
Democrats countered that the bill targets transgender students, already a vulnerable group of young people studies have shown are particularly susceptible to mental health problems.
“This bill does not make our children safer,” said Rep. Jasmine Clark, D-Lilburn. “It’s a license to harass, bully, and harm.”
Other opponents said the bill isn’t necessary because no transgender males are currently competing in women’s sports in Georgia. House Democrats accused their Republican colleagues of seeking to score political gains at the expense of a tiny minority of Georgians.
“This is not about fairness. This is not about safety. This is about politics,” said Rep. Karla Drenner, D-Avondale Estates. “It’s a manufactured crisis designed not to solve a real problem but to create division and fear.”
But Rep. Chris Erwin, R-Homer, chairman of the House Education Committee, said the bill’s purpose is to promote “fairness, safety, and integrity” in school and college sports.
“This legislation does not target individuals,” he said. “It targets inequity.”
After the votes, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones – who presides over the Senate – called the bill a “historic step toward achieving a critical goal” for the 2025 legislative session.
“Since I took office in 2023 as lieutenant governor, the Senate has led the way to make protections for females competing in athletics on any level a reality,” Jones said.
“Today, the General Assembly sent a clear message – biological men are not welcome in girls’ sports or spaces here in Georgia,” added House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington. “The House was proud to support this measure, which builds on prior protections championed by the House.”
The bill now heads to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk for his signature.
by Ty Tagami | Mar 25, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Transgender student athletes would be banned from female sports under two bills in the Georgia legislature, and the version from the state Senate has taken the lead.
A committee of the Georgia House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 1 Tuesday after it was amended to mirror some elements of the version from the House of Representatives, which awaits a Senate hearing.
Both measures passed their own chambers largely along party lines.
The Senate version now carries the same title as House Bill 267, which was named after Riley Gaines. She became a flag bearer for the movement to ban transgender athletes born male from female sports after she lost a swimming championship to a transgender athlete in 2022.
SB 1 was not amended to copy HB 267 in one very big way though: the House bill would alter most of Georgia law to read “sex” where the word “gender” is used. SB 1 would only do that in relation to school and college sports.
Proponents, including Christian groups, say a ban is needed to protect female athletes against physically stronger competitors despite testimony that very few transgender athletes exist and that transgender people are not always larger and stronger.
“We are creating a boundary around female sport,” Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, the chief sponsor of SB 1, said Tuesday. The House Education Committee then passed his bill on to the House Rules Committee, paving the way for a vote by the full House. There was significant committee opposition to passage, but it was a voice vote without a public tally.
Rep. Josh Bonner, R-Fayetteville, the chief sponsor of HB 267, signaled House collaboration with the Senate when he called the new version of SB 1 a “commonsense compromise.”
Before the vote, the committee took public testimony that was consistent with what lawmakers have heard previously. A lawyer for Frontline Policy Action, a Christian advocacy group, testified that her organization helped write both the House and Senate versions of the legislation and supported SB 1, as did a representative of the Georgia Faith and Freedom Coalition.
Critics testified that if SB 1 were to become law, females who look male could get accused of being transgender and become subject to bullying. The legislation empowers parents to make accusations and to sue schools and colleges — both public and private — that they believe have violated the transgender prohibition.
Opponents also said elementary school children would be affected despite the focus on adults like Gaines.
Transgender people are an exceptionally small demographic. The Williams Institute at the UCLA law school estimates there are 1.6 million transgender people ages 13 and older in the United States, including nearly 22,000 in Georgia, of whom 3,400 are minors.
“With so many Georgians struggling for things like just trying to get by and pay the bills, I really wonder why we’re focused on this,” said Rev. Kimble Sorrells, a United Church of Christ minister. “It feels like this is really just political grandstanding.”
by Ty Tagami | Feb 27, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
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.
