A defiant Gov. Ron DeSantis Tuesday signed a bill that bans transgender girls – biological boys – from competing in girls sports.
“At a bill signing event at the Trinity Christian Academy in Jacksonville, DeSantis touted the ban as a way to protect the integrity of women’s and girls’ sports,” Tampa Bay Times reported, describing the bill as “controversial.”
The new law ensures that student-athletes compete in athletics based on the sex they were assigned at birth.
Florida follows Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee in enacting such legislation, as the issue takes center stage in many states across the country. At least 35 bills have been introduced nationwide that would protect girls and women’s sports from biologically male competitors.
“In Florida, girls are going to play girls’ sports, and boys are going to play boys’ sports,” DeSantis said during the signing ceremony.
The LGBT group Human Rights Campaign immediately vowed to sue the state.
“Gov. DeSantis and Florida lawmakers are legislating based on a false, discriminatory premise that puts the safety and well-being of transgender children on the line,” said Alphonso David, the president of the group. “Transgender kids are kids; transgender girls are girls. Like all children, they deserve the opportunity to play sports with their friends and be a part of a team.”
DeSantis was defiant in an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tuesday night, and responded to threats from the NCAA, which warned that it might refuse to hold its events in states that ban transgender women from women’s sports.
He said:
I think as these bills were going through various legislatures, I remember the NCAA put out a statement saying any state that enacts this, we’re not going to hold events there. And so I called the Speaker of the House in Florida and I said, ‘did you hear what they said?’ And he’s like, ‘yeah,’ I said, we definitely got to get this done.
You can’t be cowed by these organizations, or particularly by woke corporations from doing the right thing. And so my view was throughout this whole time, we have to protect our girls, it is discriminatory to force them to compete against biological males. And so if the price of having a tournament is that I have to deny equal opportunity to hundreds of thousands of young girl and women athletes throughout Florida, I am much more willing to stand with the girls. And to hell with these events.
DeSantis, armed with a legislature that is controlled by Republicans, continues his streak of enacting conservative legislation.
Recently, he has signed bills banning vaccine passports, ending the teaching of Critical Race Theory, curbing rioting, expanding school choice, and, in a first of its kind effort, fining Big Tech companies for censoring politicians.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a contributor at The Florida Capital Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
