In their push to write transphobia into law, Republicans' latest focus has been efforts to ban trans athletes from school and college sports programs for girls and women.
Allowing trans female athletes to compete on womens' teams, Republicans claim, creates unfair advantages that result in the loss of titles, scholarships and other achievements for cisgender female athletes.
There's just one problem―not one GOP politician can name a single instance of this happening, as the Human Rights Campaign laid out in brilliant and damning video shared to social media today.
The video showed legislator after legislator being called to account for the accusations on which their legislation is based, such as those leveled in a North Carolina bill introduced this week.
One of that bill's sponsors, Representative Mark Brody, claimed:
"[Cisgender girls and women are] pushed out of female sports, and all of their records are broken, scholarships lost and benefits of excelling are diminishing before this is addressed."
But as the HRC's video showed, there is no evidence that happens, and not one legislator has been able to name a single example of a cisgender athlete being denied a title, scholarship or any other reward because of a transgender athlete.
Not only that, none of the legislators the HRC highlighted knew if their state has any transgender athletes to begin with. One Missouri lawmaker simply said "I don't have a clue" when asked for a tally of transgender athletes. Legislators in Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Arizona were similarly clueless.
And on Twitter, many people felt that it was crystal clear what really motivates these bills: plain and simple transphobic bigotry.
Despite the profound ignorance on the part of Republican legislators and the lack of issues the bills are meant to rectify, twenty-nine states have introduced legislation to ban trans women and girls from sports just this year.
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