Just last year, the Hawaii representative co-sponsored a bill designed to ban the kind of exclusion that this bill introduced on Thursday aims to engineer, and critics aren’t letting go of the contradiction in her positions.
US Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) is facing backlash after introducing a bill aiming to exclude trans women from competing in women’s sports, contracting a longstanding claim she was a supporter of LGBTQ rights. Gabbard, who did not seek reelection, has just weeks before she leaves office.
A similar bill was introduced in the Senate in September by Sen. Kelly Loughler (R-GA), and similar bills have been introduced in more than a dozen state legislatures this year. In March, Idaho became the first to pass the bill into law, but in August, a federal judge in Idaho blocked its implementation.
The question of whether or not Title IX includes transgender people, whose gender is not the one they were assigned at birth, has become a political tug-of-war in the last few years. In 2016, when Barack Obama was still US president, the US Department of Education issued new guidance saying that Title IX protected the right of trans people to use the bathroom of their chosen gender. The following year, when Donald Trump became president, he quickly reversed the decision.
“The State has not identified a legitimate interest served by the Act that the preexisting rules in Idaho did not already address, other than an invalid interest of excluding transgender women and girls from women’s sports entirely, regardless of their physiological characteristics,” US District Judge for the District of Idaho David Nye wrote.
At issue is the question of whether or not trans women have an unfair athletic advantage over cisgender women due to aspects of their physiology that would seemingly violate the fairness prescriptions at the heart of legislation like Title IX. While firm conclusions are still out, those studies that have been done point to hormone replacement therapy (HRT), by which testosterone production is suppressed and replaced by estrogen, reducing the physical performance of trans women to well below that of cis men.
“Part of the problem on the anti-trans side is that they’re starting from the base assumption that trans women are men, and substitute cis male physical traits when discussing whether trans women may have competitive advantages,” she wrote. “They’ll argue that men have bigger hearts and more lung capacity, or produce more red blood cells on average than cis women, and then assume trans women’s bodies would be the same. But initial scientific findings don’t necessarily support that.”
News of the bill brought no shortage of ire on social media, as critics pointed out Gabbard’s longstanding claim to have rejected her past anti-LGBTQ beliefs was now rendered invalid and noted this was just one more issue on which she was out of step with the Democratic Party.
“Tulsi Gabbard is now introducing a blatantly transphobic piece of legislation aimed at trans and non-binary young people,” Charlottle Clymer, a former press secretary at LGBTQ rights group Human Rights Campaign, wrote on Twitter. “Of course, that’s hardly surprising for a Republican.”
“Remember when Tulsi Gabbard tried to convince us she was an LGBTQ ally?” wrote Zeke Stokes, the former chief program officer for GLAAD, an LGBTQ advocacy group. “We knew she was a liar, a fraud. Here’s the proof.”
Human Rights Campaign gave Gabbard a 100% on their voting scorecard for the 115th Congress, whose term ran from January 2017 to January 2019 – a fact she made sure to tout at Democratic presidential primary events in September and October of 2019 that focused on LGBTQ rights. However, many expressed skepticism at her claim to have renounced her prominent anti-LGBTQ views from earlier in life.
“Too often, the LGBTQ community still faces discrimination in the workplace, in education, or when trying to find a home,” Gabbard said in a March 2019 news release accompanying introduction of the Equality Act. “It’s long overdue that we extend civil rights protections to the LGBTQ community and ensure equal treatment for all Americans under the law – regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender, religion, disability, or national origin.”
Sourse: sputniknews.com
