Too many leaders on the Statehouse can’t appear to maintain out of individuals’s pants. Every session, they attempt to inform girls what they will and might’t do with their vaginas. They’ve been recognized to inform individuals what lavatory to make use of. And now they wish to maintain transgender athletes who determine as feminine from collaborating in girls’s sports activities.
Boil it down and the legislature is doing what it’s lengthy finished — engaged on one other approach to discriminate towards South Carolinians. It’s preying upon concern, misinformation, disinformation and ignorance to segregate one other class of individuals — this time weak college students who’re grappling with their gender identification — to attain factors and make one thing personal turn into pink meat on the polls.
It’s mistaken. And it sends one other message that South Carolina needs to regress to the Fifties, not put together for the 2050s.
Last week within the South Carolina House of Representatives, 80 apparently gender-obsessed, largely Republican legislators voted to approve H. 4606, the so-called “Save Women’s Sports Act.” It discriminates towards transgender athletes at secondary faculties and schools by holding “athletic teams or sports designated for females, women or girls may not be open to students of the male sex.” Interestingly, the proposed measure, which now heads to the state Senate, is OK with organic girls collaborating in males’s sports activities.
Legislators’ reasoning for the discrimination in feminine applications is equity, which suspiciously feels like the identical form of justification of people that nonetheless say the Civil War was fought over state’s rights, not slavery.
Unfortunately, legislators are whipping up public fervor when there’s already a workable state of affairs on the S.C. High School Sports League to take care of transgender athletes who wish to play feminine sports activities. In latest years, simply 5 transgender college students have appealed rulings to play on girls’s groups; three have been authorised. [South Carolina has about 800,000 public school students in grades K-12.]
Yet the House apparently is aware of higher and desires this regulation additionally to guard college students who tattle on a peer’s organic gender. That, too, is mistaken. We shouldn’t go any regulation that has the potential consequence of encouraging examination of youngsters’ genitals to find out which sports activities area they play on.
Not solely is the invoice for the Save Women’s Sports Act discriminatory, however it’s simply plain silly. Gender identification isn’t so simple as XX chromosomes for girls and XY for males. There are XXY individuals within the inhabitants. How would the Einsteins within the legislature classify them? Could they play on a males’s or girls’s sports activities group, or each?
South Carolina has too lengthy of a historical past of discrimination. In the previous, the state has authorised of enslaving individuals and segregating faculties, lunch counters and water fountains. They banned interracial and homosexual marriage, excluded girls from voting and institutionalized spiritual discrimination. To today, South Carolina is only one of two states with out
a hate crimes regulation.
Let’s not proceed the stain of discrimination by selecting on one other minority — transgender children. Let’s hope the state Senate will throw out this ignorant proposal.
Help the City Paper maintain delivering excellence
Winner of high 2021 state journalism honors (greatest editorial writing and greatest cartoon), the Charleston City Paper brings you the Best of Charleston day by day. Support our “unafraid” journalism with a one-time donation or turn into a member of the City Paper Club.