Virginia is moving ahead with a petition that could ban transgender women from playing in women’s sports and changing in women’s locker rooms at the state regulatory level.
The Virginia Board of Health voted to approve a petition calling for the state to create regulations preventing transgender females from competing in women’s sports and using female-designated spaces. The board, a subsidiary of the Virginia Department of Health, voted unanimously to move ahead with the rulemaking process in a special meeting Monday, with 14 out of 15 board members in attendance.
Three female collegiate athletes from Virginia filed the petition on April 10, saying they each “have been directly harmed by males competing in female collegiate sports.” The petition garnered over 2,300 comments from Virginians during the 21-day public comment period, with 54% of commenters writing against the petition and 45.4% writing in favor of the petition, according to a board-published analysis.
“After evaluation and consideration, the Board of Health decided to grant the petition for rulemaking,” Maria Reppas, director of communications for the Virginia Department of Health, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The Board of Health based its vote on a thorough assessment of the petition’s merits in the context of Virginia’s ongoing health needs. The next step in the regulatory process is to draft a Notice of Intended Regulatory Action (NOIRA) for the Board of Health’s future consideration.”
A NOIRA typically does not include actual regulatory text, Reppas said, but instead notifies the public that the state is considering a regulatory change and outlines what the change entails. The Virginia Department of Health will then hold another at least 30-day public comment period and then follow the next two steps in the standard regulatory process: drafting a proposed regulation and final regulation. The entire three-step process can take between 18 months and two years, according to Reppas.
“The Virginia Department of Health remains committed to making Virginia the healthiest state in the nation, and we will work with the Board of Health to move forward with the regulatory process,” Reppas said.
Monday’s board vote follows an announcement from the Education Department that it plans to pull federal funding out from under five northern Virginia school districts after the department found the districts’ transgender policies violated Title IX. The Trump administration gave the districts a deadline of last Friday to adopt their proposed resolution agreement while dangling the threat of pulled funding, but the districts did not comply.
The Virginia High School League ratified a policy to prevent transgender women from playing in high school girls’ sports in May. In February, the NCAA announced its policy to limit women’s sports to people who were assigned the female sex at birth. This all followed President Donald Trump’s February executive action titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which promoted keeping biological men out of women’s athletics.
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One of the petitioners, Réka György, said in her bio that she missed the finals of the 2022 Women’s Swimming and Diving NCAA Championship for the 500-yard freestyle by one spot after placing 17th in a competition that Lia Thomas, who is transgender, won. György also detailed an uncomfortable interaction with Thomas in the locker room in which she felt “her privacy was taken away.”
György competed as a swimmer for Hungary in the 2016 Olympics and graduated from Virginia Tech as a swimmer in 2022. György did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment. The other two petitioners, Lily Mullens and Carter Satterfield, are both swimmers at Roanoke College in Virginia.
