Attorney General William Barr on Friday threw his support behind the Idaho state government for preventing transgender people from participating in women’s sports.
“Allowing biological males to compete in all-female sports is fundamentally unfair to female athletes,” he said, referencing Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, a controversial piece of legislation enacted earlier this year.
The act, which has come under fire for allegedly violating the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, limits participation in certain team sports to people who are biologically female. Barr defended the act, saying that unless the requirements for sports leagues are rooted in biological differences, there can be no fairness in sports.
“This limitation is based on the same exact interest that allows the creation of sex-specific athletic teams in the first place — namely, the goal of ensuring that biological females have equal athletic opportunities,” Barr said. “Single-sex athletics is rooted in the reality of biological differences between the sexes and should stay rooted in objective biological fact.”
The act states that “having separate sex specific teams furthers efforts to promote sex equality” because such teams provide “opportunities for female athletes to demonstrate their skill, strength, and athletic abilities while also providing them with opportunities to obtain recognition and accolades, college scholarships, and the numerous other long-term benefits that flow from success in athletic endeavors.”
Barr’s statement comes several days after the Supreme Court delivered a landmark decision ruling that revised Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to say that employers can’t fire people for being transgender or gay. Opponents of the decision, including Justice Samuel Alito, expressed fears that the decision would hurt women, especially in sports.
“Today’s decision may have effects that extend well beyond the domain of federal antidiscrimination statutes,” Alito wrote, before alluding to the controversy in Idaho. “This potential is illustrated by pending and recent lower court cases in which transgender individuals have challenged a variety of federal, state, and local laws and policies on constitutional grounds.”
Following the decision, a group of faith-based colleges, led by the Catholic University of America and Brigham Young University, said they feared a revision to Title VII might inevitably mean a revision to Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded educational institutions.
