LEXIE CANNES STATE OF TRANS — Never mind the U.S. Department of Education’s insistence that transgender students athletes are protected by Title IX, a Republican legislator in South Dakota wants to ban trans student athletes from playing on a team that doesn’t match the stated gender on their birth certificate.
South Dakota House Rep. Jim Bolin has already succeed in pushing his trans athletes ban bill out of committee by a 10 to 2 vote earlier this week. Bolin is aiming undo the South Dakota High School Activities Association’s recent policy that allows trans students in interscholastic athletics to play on teams based on gender identity.
ThinkProgress has Bolin stating that the association’s recent policy is “very bad decision” that “raises profound issues about the nature of high school sports in our state.”
A right-wing organization, the South Dakota Family Policy Council, is supporting the bill citing “anatomical” and locker room concerns.
Zack Ford of ThinkProgress notes that “transgender-inclusive athletic policies are becoming incredibly common” and the bill may contradict federal law.
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No reading between the lines needed — this is another transphobic bathroom bill, and Rep. Jim Bolin is another bathroom cop.
Recent article I wrote about another bathroom cop: https://lexiecannes.com/2015/02/08/another-transphobic-bathroom-cop-surfaces-this-time-in-florida/
South Dakota: http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/02/10/3621254/south-dakota-transgender-athletes/
Watch LEXIE CANNES right now: http://www.amazon.com/Lexie-Cannes-CourtneyODonnell/dp/B00KEYH3LQ Or get the DVD: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0963781332
LEXIE CANNES STATE OF TRANS is associated with Wipe Out Transphobia: http://www.wipeouttransphobia.com/
Read Lexie Cannes in The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/courtney-odonnell/
Categories: Discrimination, Equality, Civil Rights, Legislative, Policy, Administrative, Transgender, Transsexual, Trans
LEXIE CANNES STATE OF TRANS 
All of this obsessive-compulsive behavior around bathrooms really has very little to do with transgender people. It’s really about evangelicals (men mostly) who want to preserve the gender cast system established in the old testament that woman was created to serve man. It’s about preserving the virginity of women to be suitable acquisitions. Invariably, the issue of legally defining gender becomes problematic which of course is made visible by transgender women. They resort to “biological gender” which is ambiguous or birth certificate which can be changed. If they want to conceal their ignorance maybe they should just say what they mean. Of course that would expose the sexism in their intentions.
Agree! Thanks for commenting.
Transgender people have the same rights as CIS people!!!!!!
That’s exactly right.
Lexie, thank you for posting this story. As the only transgender member of board of directors of http://www.eqsdity South Dakota, I’m very involved in the fight against the two anti-trans bills and the anti-LGBT religious freedom to discriminate bill. South Dakota is usually considered fly over country and we seldom draw national attention from both the news and the national LGBT equality orgs. As luck would have it, I was attending the Creating Change Conference in Denver last week when I got word that the hearing for HB 1195 had been set for 7:45 am Monday Feb 9th. Being at the conference provided me with a unique opportunity to have direct contact with repersentives of the various national orgs that were attending. Between working with TLC, NCTE, PFLAG and people back home we were able to put together a good team to testify against the bill. Our team included and attorney with the ACLU, the regional director of PFLAG and two young transwomen, one still in high school and one who had had a horrible experiance during high school. In spite of of very good testimony, sadly, as you have reported in the above article, the bill passed the committee and now moves to the house floor for a vote. The first bill to come to a vote is HB 1161, which will make it illegal for the activities association to ever make any policies that are favorable to students on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, will voted on by the full house on Thursday Feb 19th. We need people to send emails to every single repersentive in our state asking them to vote “NO” on the two anti-transgender bills, HB 1161 and 1195.
Information on who to write too and suggestions on what to say are available on the Equality South Dakota home page at http://www.eqsd.org
We need all the help that we can get to defeat these horrible bills.
Thank you,
Tamara J Urban
Member, BOD Equality South Dakota
Director of Transgender Services for Common Ground Diversity Center
Thanks for commenting and good luck!
Opps, that should be Equality South Dakota , not (http://eqsdity). My bad. 🙂
Tamara