Louisiana Lawmakers Pass Transgender Sports Ban into Law
metroweekly.comlaw, dubbed “The Fairness in Women’s Sports Act,” requires Louisiana K-12 schools, as well as universities, to designate all sports teams as for males or females, as determined by a person’s assigned sex at birth.
Its passage into law makes Louisiana the 18th state to explicitly pass such restrictions into law, although Georgia effectively has a ban in place, having handed off responsibility to the Georgia High School Association, which implemented a restoration of its own.Under the Louisiana bill, coeducational, or mixed, teams will be open to both males and females, as long as a school does not disband a female-designated team for the purpose of creating a coed team, which the new law says would place cisgender females at an athletic disadvantage.
The gender-specific restrictions do not apply to intramural sports teams.Gov. John Bel Edwards vetoed a nearly identical bill last year.
But after the regular legislative session ended on Monday evening, he told reporters it was obvious this year’s measure — which passed with the votes of more than two-thirds of lawmakers — was going to pass, especially after lawmakers rolled back the scope of the bill to exclude intramural sports.
