Alaska‘s board of education voted last week to approve a measure banning trans-identifying men in women’s sports.
QUICK FACTS:
- The Alaskan Board of Education passed a proposal last week forbidding biological men from competing in women’s high school sports.
- The proposal claims that “if a separate high school athletics team is established for female students, participation shall be limited to females who were assigned females at birth.”
- Once signed by Republican Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor, the measure will apply to school districts that join the Alaska School Activities Association (ASAA), which regulates high school sports in the state.
- “However, if a school determines that a transgender student is eligible to compete, that determination ‘shall remain in effect for the duration of the student’s high school eligibility,’” according to the board.
- Current ASAA guidelines allow the individual school to decide if transgender boys are allowed to compete on girls’ sports teams.
ALASKA’S BOARD OF EDUCATION ON BIOLOGICAL MEN COMPETING IN WOMEN’S SPORTS:
“Transgender students attending member schools that do not have written policies in place ‘may only participate based upon [their] gender assigned at birth,’ according to ASAA guidelines,” Alaska’s new proposal states.
BACKGROUND:
- In March 2023, Wyoming Republican Governor Mark Gordon allowed a bill banning biological males from girls’ sports to pass without his signature.
- “Understanding the political reality that will prolong these very divisive debates, I am willing to let this pass into law without benefit of my signature,” the governor wrote in a letter.
- The bill passed both the House and Senate in a landslide vote.
- The bill requires school athletic teams to select athletes based on sex, defining sex as “the biological, physical condition of being male or female, determined by an individual’s genetics and anatomy at birth.”
- “A student of the male sex shall not compete, and a public school shall not allow a student of the male sex to compete, in an athletic activity or team designated for students of the female sex,” according to the bill.
- Republican Wyoming state Senator Wendy Schuler, the bill’s sponsor, told the House Education Committee last month that “fairness goes out the window if they’re [transgender athletes] allowed to compete against females in the female lane.”
- The bill took effect on July 1, 2023.
