President Trump, in his continuing attacks on the transgender community, today issued yet another discriminatory executive order, this one barring transgender girls and women athletes from participating in interscholastic and collegiate sports. Lambda Legal Senior Attorney Carl Charles issued the following statement:
“There seems no bottom to which this administration will not go to hurt and exclude transgender people, especially transgender children and youth. Not content to try to ban transgender military service members from serving their country, and to try to block transgender youth from receiving essential and scientifically-proven health care, and to deny transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people access to accurate identity documents, and to try their hardest to erase the existence of LGBTQ+ people from school curricula and the American workplace, today President Trump takes aim at K-12 and college athletes—a vanishingly small subset of people who on the whole, outside of a few sensationalized examples, have been participating in school sports programs for decades with absolutely no issues.
“Make no mistake, multiple states have attempted to enact similar bans. We’ve confronted them in court repeatedly and have won repeatedly. There is no reason to think a national ban will avoid being similarly squashed. We are appalled, and in fact disgusted, at this administration’s insatiable appetite for fearmongering about and relentless targeting of this most vulnerable population. And we are neither cowed nor deterred. We and our partners are standing together to protect those rights already won, and fight for those still needed, to allow the LGBTQ+ community and everyone living with HIV to live freely and safely as their full and authentic selves—a freedom everyone in this country should be able to take for granted.”
Read about Lambda Legal’s fight against state sports bans here and here.