SC’s Tom Rice signs onto women’s sports bill criticized as anti-trans
U.S. Rep. Tom Rice on Friday said he would join a Republican-led effort to ban trans people from competing in sports at the high school and college levels.
Rice said he supports the legislation — dubbed the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act” — which would punish organizations sponsoring sporting events that allow trans athletes to compete according to the gender they identify with.
The bill would make it a violation of federal law to receive federal funding if it permits “a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls.”
The bill would apply to school districts and colleges that receive federal funding.
If those schools or colleges allow trans women to compete alongside cis-gendered women, their federal funding would be in jeopardy.
The bill further defines a person’s sex as “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.’’
Decades of scholarship and LGBTQ+ activism disagree that definition.
Many scholars and activists, including those in the medical field, have argued a person’s gender identity is separate from their biological sex assigned at birth. With that, they believe trans people should be able to compete in the sport corresponding to the gender they identify with.
Rice disagrees.
“Biological males should not be able to compete against biological females, period,” Rice wrote in a statement Friday.
Data shows that few trans people compete in sports at all. In K-12, South Carolina state superintendent Molly Spearman has said there are just a handful of such athletes out of millions of students in public schools across the state.
Rice spokesperson Maryanne Martini declined to comment further on why Rice chose to support the legislation.
At town hall events around Horry County, Rice tends to focus on economic issues rather than cultural ones.
In his statement about the legislation, Rice invoked the collegiate swimmer Emma Weyant.
Weyant recently lost a NCAA swimming race against the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas. Thomas came in first while Weyant came in second.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis weighed in on Weyant’s loss and called her the “rightful winner” because Thomas was trans.
“I stand with Emma Weyant and all female athletes who deserve equal opportunity in joining teams, setting records, and earning scholarships,” Rice said in his statement.
Florida U.S. Rep. Greg Steube is the lead sponsor of the legislation to ban trans athletes from competing in women’s sports.
Georgia U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn have also sponsored the bill.
Such legislation has been roundly criticized as harmful to trans people by a number of groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and LGBTQ advocacy organizations.
Opposing a similar state-level bill in Idaho in late 2020, the National Women’s Law Center said the legislation was “dangerous because it supports a culture that normalizes ‘othering’, policing the bodies of all women and girls, and harming women and girls who are transgender.”
The ACLU, in a February 2021 blog post, also denounced state and federal legislation that seeks to restrict trans athletes.
The recent surge of legislation against trans athletes appears to stem from an executive order President Joe Biden issued shortly after taking office in January 2021.
That order affirmed that discriminating against LGBTQ people was illegal.
South Carolina has its own legislation aimed at restricting trans athletes from participating in sports, and the state Senate’s education committee voted this week to send it to the floor for a vote, the first time such a bill has made it that far.
Republicans, though, are not unified on the issue.
North Myrtle Beach-area state Sen. Greg Hembree criticized South Carolina’s legislation for not being ready for a full-floor vote, noting that educators hadn’t been invited to weigh in on it.
And in Utah, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox recently vetoed a bill similar to others aimed at trans athletes, noting that only four such athletes compete in the state. Indiana’s Republican governor vetoed a similar bill recently, too.
A parent speaks out
Diane Barnett, the head of the Pawley’s Island LGBTQ advocacy organization PFLAG, said her child could be affected by legislation aimed at trans athletes.
Barnett’s child identifies as non-binary and argued that legislation aimed at trans people ultimately hurts everyone.
“When the government starts telling us where we belong and what we can do with our bodies regardless of who our kids are, there’s some over stepping there,” she said. “We have federal laws that protect inclusion for a reason.”
Barnett noted that numerous factors contribute to a person coming out as trans and that winning at sports is not one of those factors.
“There’s a lot that goes into these kids coming out and saying, ‘I’m trans.’ They don’t do it just to get on a sports team,” she said.
“The (argument) that your girls aren’t going to have a spot because born males are going to take that spot? That’s unfounded.”
This story was originally published March 25, 2022 at 1:25 PM.
