Illinois HB 4082 Interschoolastic Sports- Gender would amend Interscholastic Athletic Organization Act by including a section about gender. This bill would require sports in schools to only allow 3 categories of sports teams, one for “biological” males/boys, one for “biological” females/girls, and a coed team. HB 4082 explicitly prohibits “biological” males from participating in the girls’ team. This is a direct attempt to discriminate against trans women. While this bill would lead to systemic discrimination against the trans community in sports, it also validates transphobia by giving schools legal protection from any organization that tries to take adverse action against this discrimination.
This bill would decide team participation based on a written statement from parents verifying the students age, gender, and whether or not the student has taken performance enhancing drugs. This bill defines gender as “the students biological sex, ascertained at or before birth in accordance with the student’s genetics and reproductive biology”. Representatives of Illinois are pushing a bill that ignores up to date science. They are conflating sex and gender as the same thing. Furthermore, many intersex individuals don’t find out about their intersexuality until puberty, some never find out. Intersexuality is a term used to describe people who don’t fit into the binary of male or female. Sex is dependent on a number of biological characteristics including genitalia, hormones, internal anatomy, and chromosomes. Unless a newborn has a medical need for more thorough testing, most sex determination is based on what genitalia the doctors can see once the baby is born. This means that ultrasound and visual genitalia predictions are not a valid measure of gender, let alone sex.
Write to your representatives today and tell them not to support HB 4082.