A Georgia bill by six republican representatives attempts to ban transgender girls and women from school and college sports by a patriarchal gatekeeping of womanhood, and creates pathways for transmisogyny to be rewarded by the law.

The proposed act would let cisgender students take action against schools to recieve ‘relief to be compensated’ for playing with trans students and invites policing of gender against all youth through bio-essentialist ideas that perpetuate white supremicist-patriarchal that mold cisgender women and girls into a category that needs ‘protection.’

This systemic transmisogyny reproduces the idea of associating femininity with fragility through its notion of toxic masculinity – textbook gender stereotypes that cast cisgender men as superior to all others.

The sex and gender binary are social constructs that restrict everyone regardless of their gender identity and this bill attempts to replace ‘gender’ with ‘sex’ – following the common theme of erasure in the legislative attacks that attack trans youth by dismissing that trans and intersex people exist.

The arguments attempting to uphold differences based on “biological sex”, fall apart the more you dig into the science of how genes, gonads, and hormones keep sex subject to change: “The truth is, your biological sex isn’t carved in stone, but a living system with the potential for change,” Neurobiologist Dr. Simón(e) D Sun writes in the Scientific American.

Excluding trans girls and femme youth from participating in sports has negative outcomes for trans and non-trans youth through policing of gender by invasive procedures and tests that have been used against Black athletes like Caster Semenya.

Researchers Jack Turban and Jules Gill-Peterson describe how conservatives’ refusal to acknowledge that trans women are not cisgender men, is an attack on science: “Unlike cisgender men, transgender women face dramatically elevated rates of bullying, harassment and subsequent anxiety and depression -- all of which make it difficult to train and succeed in athletics from a young age. In short, these anti-sports bills don't just deny scientific and social reality, they pretend to reverse it,” they write.

GA HB 276 has carried over from last year’s legislative sessions.