According to the Washington Post, laws protecting female-only athletic competitions in fact “ban transgender athletes from participating in sports.”
Earlier this week, the Kentucky legislature voted to override Democratic governor Andy Beshear’s veto of a bill requiring athletes in grades 6–12, as well as college athletes, to compete against members of their own biological sex rather than against members of the sex with which they identify.
Opponents of the law have attempted to characterize it as a ban on student athletes who experience gender dysphoria. “We are talking about 12-, 13-, and 14-year-old girls here in Kentucky who will be told that because they are transgender children, they are not allowed to participate with their classmates,” Democratic state senator Karen Berg said in opposing the bill.
In a statement explaining his veto, Beshear said the bill would “ban transgender children from participating in girls’ and women’s sports without presenting a single instance in Kentucky of a child gaining a competitive advantage as a result of sex reassignment.”
Now the Post has adopted that same position, writing in a supposed reporting article that Kentucky lawmakers “used their lopsided majorities to finish overriding a Beshear veto of their effort to ban transgender athletes from participating in sports.”
What both Democratic politicians and their media allies ignore is that the law doesn’t ban anyone from competition; it requires student athletes to compete against others of the same biological makeup, for reasons of fairness and, in some cases, privacy. That they are unwilling to defend their opposition to such laws without blatantly mischaracterizing them speaks volumes about the soundness of their position.