Latest news with #JoshBonner
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Ban on trans girls playing girls' school sports clears Georgia House
State Rep. Josh Bonner in the state House chamber after his transgender sports ban passed Feb. 27, 2025. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder The Georgia House passed its version of a transgender sports ban Thursday, which also strips out references to 'gender' across state code, replacing them with 'sex.' 'I think we've been very clear. No young woman should ever be forced to face a biological male on the court, on the field or in the locker room. And I'm grateful for this body's continued leadership to protect girls, protect girls in sports at every level in Georgia,' said House Speaker Jon Burns, who listed the bill as a top priority. The Riley Gaines Act, named after a swimmer who became an advocate for removing transgender women from women's sports, passed along mostly party lines with three Democrats joining the Republicans in supporting the measure, Reps. Lynn Heffner of Augusta, Tangie Herring of Macon and Dexter Sharper of Valdosta. The bill would bar schools of all grade levels including college from allowing transgender girls or women to play on girls' or women's teams. It also requires separate restrooms, locker rooms and sleeping quarters based on sex at birth at student athletic events. 'We must stand for clarity over confusion, for fairness over ideological pressure, and for the fundamental right for every student to feel secure in spaces that were designed with privacy in mind,' said Rep Chris Erwin, a Homer Republican who chairs the House Education Committee. 'House Bill 267 is a measured, reasonable, and necessary response to growing concerns among parents, students, and educators alike. This bill is not about targeting anyone. Let me state that clearly: this bill is not about targeting anyone.' Some transgender Georgians feel targeted. The bill was stripped of changes to the state's 2020 hate crimes act that LGBTQ advocates said would remove legal protections to transgender Georgians who become victims of hate crimes, but some advocates say removing gender from state code could have unintended consequences. 'If this were truly about sports, this bill would focus solely on athletics,' said Avondale Estates Democratic Rep. Karla Drenner, the Legislature's first openly LGBTQ member. 'Instead, sections four and five of House Bill 267 seek to radically redefine Georgia law, touching over 45 code sections from probate courts and mental health services to organ donations, child abuse reporting, and even funeral director discipline. How do these topics affect who plays on a junior high volleyball team? Nothing. And that's the point. This bill isn't about fairness in sports. It's about rolling back protections for transgender Georgians in every aspect of their public lives.' Some transgender Georgians say they fear effectively deleting gender from state code could create problems ranging from matters like driver's licenses all the way to where transgender inmates are housed. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning transgender athletes from women's school sports, and the Georgia High School Association already bars transgender girls from girls' sports. Democrats like Democratic Rep. Anne Allen Westbrook of Savannah said Republicans were using women's sports as an opportunity to score political points. 'We all know that there is nothing going on in sports in Georgia requiring us to do this, but it polls well with primary voters, and the base has to have its red meat, right? If y'all want to punch down at vulnerable Georgians, say it with your chest, do your own dirty work, but don't pretend you're doing it for women and girls,' she said. The House vote comes weeks after the Senate passed a version that does not contain the removal of gender. Leaders from the two chambers will likely meet to discuss which version of the ban will pass both chambers ahead of the end of the session on April 4. Separately, the Senate has passed a bill to block state employees from receiving gender-affirming care from the state health insurance plan and could consider another bill to ban puberty blocking medications for minors. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
22-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Georgia House panel OKs bill to ban trans girls from girls' school sports over hate crime concerns
Speaker Jon Burns, center, praises the House transgender sports bill authored by Rep. Josh Bonner, left, and Frontline attorney Chelsea Thompson, right. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder A House committee advanced a bill Friday that Speaker Jon Burns says will protect female athletes, but opponents say it targets transgender girls who want to play girls' sports from kindergarten to college and could remove protections for trans people under the state's hate crime law. 'I'm blessed to have four granddaughters, very blessed to have four granddaughters, and they're the reason why this issue is so very, very important to me, and so very important to Georgians and people across this entire country,' Burns said. 'It's simple. Just good common sense to me as the (the bill's author, Rep. Josh Bonner) alluded to. Biological men have an undeniable and scientifically proven advantage against women when it comes to athletic competition.' The Riley Gaines Act, named after a champion swimmer and outspoken opponent of transgender sports participation, would mandate teams be based on sex as assigned at birth and prevent schools from allowing people assigned male at birth from playing on teams designated for females. Gaines testified via Zoom Friday about a 2022 competition held at Georgia Tech in which she and other cisgender women swimmers competed against and shared a locker room with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas. 'We were emotionally blackmailed into silence and submission by allowing Thomas to join the women's team and compete in women's collegiate meets,' she said. 'The University of Pennsylvania, the Ivy League, and the colleges and universities, including Georgia Tech, that hosted Thomas at these meets, prevented women from competing at all, subject to female swimmers to a loss of privacy and dignity, inflicted emotional harm on female swimmers, and suppressed our free speech rights as female athletes to advocate for our own rights.' The NCAA changed its eligibility rules after that competition following numerous complaints. The bill also specifies that schools must provide separate changing facilities, restrooms and sleeping facilities for athletic competitions, with accommodations for students who don't feel comfortable in the facilities they are required to use. The bill contains exceptions for people including custodians or maintenance workers doing their jobs as well as people responding to emergencies. The committee amended the bill Friday to include coaches, trainers and team doctors of the opposite sex who are entering the locker room for halftime strategizing or to render other competitive aid. But some LGBTQ advocates say the part they are most concerned with has nothing to do with sports. The House bill goes further than a different girls' sports bill passed by the Senate, replacing the word 'gender' with 'sex' throughout the state's code. Sex refers to the physical characteristics associated with being male or female while gender describes a person's state of mind and relation to societal norms. 'The language that was added in the final sections goes beyond anything that is to do with sports. It's an all-out attempt to strip transgender Georgians of their ability to live the same life that everybody else does in the state of Georgia,' said Jeff Graham, executive director of Georgia Equality, an LGBTQ advocacy group. Graham said he worried changing language in multiple code sections could produce unfortunate repercussions. 'There are unintended consequences that are going to have serious implications, not just for the transgender community, but I worry for girls and the women across the board,' he said. Powder Springs Democratic Rep. David Wilkerson said he is concerned that the language could remove transgender Georgians' protection under the state's hate crimes law. That law provides additional fines and jail time for people who commit crimes motivated by factors like race, religion, sexual orientation or disability. Wilkerson and others argue removing gender from that list would lift protections in cases where people are attacked because they are transgender. 'So sex is how you're born, according to this definition, male or female,' Wilkerson said. 'Gender is how you identify. So yes, if someone identifies as a sex that they're not born with and they're being attacked because of that, they have taken that protection out of the law.' 'We never want to come in here and lessen somebody's rights and under this bill, their rights would be lessened,' he added. 'The protections under the law would be lessened under this.' Bonner said that's not how the bill works. He said gender is never defined in Georgia state code and replacing it with sex will clear things up. He said a transgender person who is targeted for a crime because of their identity would not lose any rights. 'We believe that person still has the full protections of the hate crimes bill as passed,' he said. 'All we're doing is removing the word gender, replacing it with sex, because even under the situation that you put forward, it is still an issue of sex.' '(A suspect) is making their decision based on someone's perceived sex,' he added. 'And so whether you want to call it transgender or whatever you want to call it, they still have that protection under the law, and we've seen, and there are cases in which the courts do agree with that, because gender is not a defined term in Georgia code, but now sex will be. So in fact, that individual that you mentioned will have a greater protection than they have today.' Chelsea Thompson, an attorney for the evangelical conservative lobbying group Frontline, who helped author the bill, said the U.S. Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County supports Bonner's position. In that case, which is viewed as a landmark for LGBTQ rights, the majority ruled that firing an employee because they are gay or transgender is a form of sex discrimination. 'In the opinion, the Supreme Court says it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that person, against that individual based on sex,' she said. Responding to reporters' questions in the hallway outside the committee meeting, Burns implied he wants the hate crime to continue to cover transgender Georgians. 'We're going to protect everyone,' he said. 'We're going to be fair.' SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
20-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Georgia House panel OKs bill to bar trans girls from playing school sports on girls' teams
Rep. Josh Bonner, right, presents his transgender sports bill before committee, alongside Chelsea Thompson, general counsel for Frontline Policy Council. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder A House subcommittee moved forward a bill that would bar transgender girls from playing sports on girls' teams in schools of all grade levels, including college. 'All we're attempting to do through this legislation, Mr. Chairman, is simply provide a level playing field for the girls in Georgia,' said the bill's sponsor, Fayetteville Republican Rep. Josh Bonner. 'To make sure that when they step on that athletic field, that all things are equal, so that, essentially, biological males are not competing against biological females.' Speaker Jon Burns listed the measure as a top priority for this year's session. House Bill 267, also known as the Riley Gaines Act, also mandates separate restroom, locker and sleeping facilities for student athletes based on the sex they were assigned at birth during sporting events, but allows for 'reasonable accommodations' including allowing the use of a single-occupancy restroom for students who do not feel comfortable using facilities that correspond to their sex at birth. Republicans like Dawsonville Republican Rep. Brent Cox called the bill a victory for women's sports. Cox said the bill reminded him of his mother, who graduated high school in 1961 and was an exceptional basketball player in a time when women were often not encouraged to play sports. 'She fought (for), as many have, (the 1972 sports gender equity law) which now we know under Title IX,' he said. 'And myself coaching, it's something that I personally am passionate about, the girls having the opportunities to play against the girls, because of all that happened from the early parts of the 1900s to get us to where we are today.' Unlike a girls' sports bill that recently passed the Senate, the proposed House legislation also replaces the word 'gender' with 'sex' throughout the state's code. 'It addresses any number of areas of code, everything from the legal, in terms of dealing with legal documents, to organ donation, to crime statistics and reporting, that kind of thing,' Bonner said. 'And that's simply to make sure that when we collect that data, that we have very decisive and definitive data points so that we know everything from the crime statistics to how they're annotating that sex on their organ donations and things like that.' The removal of gender from the state's landmark 2020 hate crimes law in particular vexed Democratic state Rep. Park Cannon, an Atlanta Democrat. The bill would remove crimes based on the victim's gender as a category for enhanced sentences under the law, though it would keep sex and sexual orientation as eligible categories, among others like race and religion. It specifies that state agencies that keep track of vital statistics for things like public health, economic measurements or crime identify each individual by their sex at birth. Cannon said those changes will strip transgender Georgians from the hate crime law's protections. 'If someone does experience a hate-based incident, which, here in District 58, we have recently seen Atlanta Police capture somebody who has intentionally been harming transgender women, it would not allow for the Georgia Bureau of Investigations to get that information and store it appropriately.' 'It was a bipartisan bill,' she added. 'It was one of my most proud moments being a member, and so to juxtapose feeling so proud with that legislation and feeling so vulnerable with this legislation, I'm really hoping that the majority will make some amendments and sit on this bill throughout the rest of the session.' More than a dozen people came to the subcommittee's Wednesday hearing, mostly to urge members to vote against the bill. Audrey Lux said she competed in women's rowing as a college student in states including Georgia but never won it big. 'I managed to avoid all controversy and publicity during my time in crew. The reason you haven't heard of me on the news is because I was simply not a great athlete,' she said. 'And that doesn't fit well into your narrative. I practiced just as hard as the other women, but I was simply not as fast as some of them, and that's just the biological reality.' Lux and other opponents of the bill argued that transgender people are relatively uncommon in the first place and are not particularly likely to be dominant in or even play sports. They compared keeping them out through legislation to bullying a vulnerable population. 'This bill, in short, is part of a larger project to strip all dignity and rights from transgender Georgians out of the law,' said Brittany Stancoff. 'And that is not something I particularly appreciate, as we haven't done anything to deserve this. I sell used books. I don't see how this is some widespread issue when there is only one case you can keep bringing back up over and over and over.' Stancoff was referring to Riley Gaines, the namesake of Georgia's bill who became an outspoken opponent of transgender participation in girls' sports after she and other swimmers competed against and shared a locker room with a transgender woman at a 2022 championship held at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The NCAA changed its eligibility rules after that competition following numerous complaints. Bonner offered a different Riley to testify at Wednesday's hearing, Riley Jones, daughter of South Forsyth Republican Rep. Todd Jones and former high school state champion for girls' pole vault. Jones said she didn't compete against any transgender athletes but likely would have lost if she had. 'The reason why I was able to win my state title was because I only went against girls,' she said. 'If I went against boys, they would have killed me. My senior year, I went 12'6' to win the state record and to win the competition. The boys, I believe there were three over 15'6', and now that's not even the woman's record.' The bill could now be headed to the full House Education Committee. It will need to pass the full House by Crossover Day, March 6, to have a clear chance of becoming law under the normal process. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
