Alabama AG files amicus brief in Idaho’s transgender sport ban case appeal • Alabama Reflector

Idaho in 2020 barred transgender women and girls from competing on female student athletic teams, starting a wave of similar bans in other states, including Alabama. A U.S. district court blocked the law later that year, ruling that it could violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the court’s decision in June, leading to an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The brief argued that the Equal Protection Clause does not require states to define sex as gender identity. 

“While the underlying questions for state legislatures, school boards, and sports commissioners may be delicate and complicated, the legal questions are straightforward,” the AGs write.

Alabama is involved in ongoing litigation over its ban on some gender-affirming care for transgender individuals under the age of 19.

Shannon Minter, vice president for legal of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), said in a Wednesday afternoon phone call that the brief was “very unpersuasive” and sets up “straw men rather than grapple with the actual legal issues presented by the case.”

The NCLR is involved in Alabama’s case over gender affirming care.

Minter said that the brief does not grapple with Bostock vs. Clayton County, a 2020 case that held that being transgender was a protected status in employment disputes.

“That is the very issue in these cases, like Bostock made that holding in an employment discrimination case, and the question legally in these cases is, does the reasoning, the reasoning at Bostock, also apply to discrimination against transgender students in schools? And yet this brief doesn’t even mention the most important case,” he said.

Cardelia Howell-Diamond, who has two transgender children, wrote in a text message Wednesday afternoon that the laws are not keeping “‘men’” out of transgender sports but rather are impacting women and girls who are not living up to a degree of perceived necessary womanhood.

Howell-Diamond referenced the treatment of Imane Khelif, the Olympic gold-medalist boxer, who faced criticism and false claims regarding her sex online. French prosecutors are investigating harassment claims, according to the Associated Press.

“This is a game where only women lose,” she wrote. “It is a power play to continue to control women’s bodies, what they can do, where they are allowed to be, and what it means to be the right kind of woman. All of it is based in fear of men losing power. Transgender children are just the easy first targets.”

Updated at 7:03 a.m. with statement from the Alabama Transgender Rights Action Coalition.