AKLEG Day 119: 'Destroying an ant with a bulldozer'

While Republicans seemed split between simmering transphobia and complete apathy to the issue, the House Minority didn’t make it easy or fast with a slate of amendments that consumed all of Saturday.

It’s Monday, Alaska. Including today, three days remain in the legislative session.

In this edition: With time fast running out on the legislative session, House Republicans spent much of the weekend muscling their trans sports ban bill through as near a filibuster as the House Minority Coalition could muster under legislative rules. While Republicans seemed split between simmering transphobia and complete apathy to the issue, the House Minority Coalition didn’t make it easy or fast with a slate of amendments that consumed all of Saturday, arguing that an ounce of empathy would go a long way for the kids targeted by the bill.

Current mood: 😞

‘Destroying an ant with a bulldozer’

A basketball court somewhere in Alaska. (Photo by Gabe/Adobe Stock)

Undaunted by public testimony, warnings of unconstitutionality, a mountain of amendments or the simple notion that there are better ways to spend the waning days of the legislative session, House Republicans showed their priorities this weekend with the passage of legislation singling out and banning trans girls from playing on teams that match their gender identity. While the Republicans insisted heading into the debate that they weren’t motivated by their simmering hatred of trans people, they also opposed several amendments that gave them an opportunity to prove otherwise.

“The majority of the body couldn’t support an amendment that just says transgender people have constitutional rights. That’s all. It’s a standalone amendment. It wouldn’t kill anybody to vote for it,” said Anchorage Democratic Rep. Andy Josephson in the closing debate on the bill. “Just give them a little bit of a victory, so they don’t think you hate them? Could you do just this one act of kindness? No, can’t do it.”

The legislation, by extreme-right Eagle River Republican Rep. Jamie Allard, would single out trans girls, prohibiting them from playing on girls’ teams and opening an avenue for people to sue districts and challenge female athletes suspected of being trans. All other students, including trans boys, would be permitted to play according to their gender identity and wouldn’t be subject to gender investigations. It’s raised constitutional issues—likely violating equal protections and Alaska’s privacy clause—and is a non-starter in the Senate, where even if leadership hadn’t already said it’s dead on arrival, there simply aren’t the hours left to get it across the finish line.

Much of the debate that spanned the nearly 90 amendments—many of which were summarily tabled—and the bill itself focused on the wellbeing of trans kids. Many warned that the kind of animosity that has fueled the bill, particularly the continued insistence by Rep. Allard and her colleagues that trans girls aren’t girls but “biological boys” trying to gain an unfair advantage, would make things difficult for kids who already have it tough.

“Trans girls are girls. Our gender identity is determined in our brains. It is coded, it is fixed,” said Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage. “99.5% of us have a gender identity in our brains that matches our physical bodies, half a percent does not.”

Rep. CJ McCormick, a young Bethel Democrat who is one of the few legislators who seems to remember what it was like to be a teenager, said it was horrible that so many people have had to fight so hard to show they deserve dignity. While he couldn’t imagine what it’s like to be in their shoes, he did have experience of what it’s like being different growing up. He said his neck, the product of a rare spinal condition, was the target of many other kids, including a particularly brutal beating behind the elementary school.

“It’s pretty tough being different and growing up in rural Alaska. But you know what saved me? My love of sports,” he said. “The kid who beat the crap out of me behind that school ended up becoming one of my best friends because we both loved football.”

He said much of being a young person is about learning and accepting each other, which can come through the shared experience of playing and loving sports. That’s why, he said, it was such a travesty that this legislation was all about adults forcing their rigid ideas of gender and bigotry on kids.

“What I keep coming back to is we’re talking about kids,” he said, his voice rising. “We’re talking about kids. We are attacking children!”

Rep. Jennie Armstrong, an Anchorage Democrat who is openly bisexual (and also played quarterback on her neighborhood football team as a kid), talked about her decision to walk away from the church after adults attacked her for being different. She said legislators backing the bill were essentially doing the same.

“Today’s kids are smarter, have better access to information, and are more engaged than any generation prior to ours. While it may not be anyone’s intent, the impact of your positive vote on this bill is blanket discrimination and cruelty against the LGBTQ community,” she said, her voice rising. “This vote is that same galvanizing moment for them. They are going to become voters, they are going to become donors, and they are going to be the future leaders of Alaska, making history in their own right. They will never forget the message that our votes send today. I am begging you, everyone in this room, to please rise above dogma and dog whistles and choose to send a message of love.”

The measure passed on a 22-18 vote and will head to a Senate that will not take it up.

As Juneau Empire reporter Mark Sabbatini put it in his coverage, “While HB 183 generated an enormous amount of concern and divisive debate statewide, it appears the only actual impact of the bill on the playing field is the House forfeited the annual legislative softball game Sunday evening since they failed to show up to play against the Senate.”

While the regulation adopted by the Board of Education last year also restricts how trans girls are allowed to play sports, Rep. Allard’s legislation would also reach into elementary schools, middle schools and colleges, establishing a duty for schools to prohibit trans girls from playing on girls’ teams. What’s important to keep in mind is that trans athletes are already incredibly rare in Alaska, with most reports agreeing that there are no openly trans athletes currently competing in any school athletics anywhere in Alaska.

As several legislators argued, pointing to examples in other states that have passed these kinds of laws, the most likely targets of this legislation are not trans athletes but cisgender girls who don’t look feminine or white enough. In Utah, a girl and her family have faced harassment and threats after a Republican member of the state’s Board of Education falsely accused her of being trans, later writing that she did so because of the girl’s “larger build” and wrote that it was “normal” to question children’s gender identity because of the “push to normalize transgenderism.”

Just how to determine who’s trans and who’s not is, perhaps unsurprisingly, left up to schools to figure out on their own. The bill mentions birth certificates as one possible method that schools may use, but it does not explicitly rule out the possibility of physical inspections of students. Under the bill, those inspections could happen without notifying a parent, which is something that the House Minority tried and failed to fix via amendment.

“Amendment 27 says before a gender inspection is done, parents will get notice. How am I supposed to believe that people on this floor support parental rights when they wouldn’t support that amendment?” Rep. Josephson said. “It doesn’t make any rational sense to me unless it somehow forces them to admit, geez, that would concede these are complicated issues.”

Interestingly, Rep. Josephson and some other members of the House Minority Coalition conceded that they had misgivings about some trans athletes competing against girls but argued that a more nuanced approach that takes into account the athletic abilities of the student and the kind of sport they’re playing. There’s no reason, he argued, that the rules should also apply to chess. He said there’s also probably no reason to be worried about a trans girl who is just so-so at basketball.

“It takes what is a paper cut on a finger and says eliminate the finger. That’s the problem with this bill. It says don’t use a scalpel, use a maul,” he said. “This bill is about destroying an ant with a bulldozer. It’s a solution in search of a problem.”

Follow the threads: The debate over the amendments/the debate on the bill

Stay tuned.