Senate Renews Transgender Attack
Without Evidence to Support Claims

Capitol Inside
September 22, 2021

The Texas Senate approved a ban on transgender athletes in high school sports for girls on Wednesday for the fourth time in five months after the measure's Republican author failed to come up with a single example to illustrate the problem that GOP leaders say they're trying to fix.

Senate Bill 3 cleared the Legislature's upper chamber on a 19-12 vote with State Senator Eddie Lucio Jr. of Brownsville as the only Democrat to side with the GOP majority in its bid to keep transgender students from taking over girls sports in Texas.

The preordained outcome on the transgender sports prohibition drew an immediate rebuke from LGBTQ advocates.

"#SB3, a bill designed to fix the manufactured crisis of trans kids dominating UIL sports with 0 examples cited on the floor, has predictably passed the Senate 19-12," the group Equality Texas tweeted this afternoon. "This is an assault on the trans community, nothing more. #TXlege, it's time to #protecttranskids, not hurt them."

State Senator Charles Perry - a Lubbock Republican who's carrying the measure for Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick - found himself at a loss for words when Democratic State Senator John Whitmire of Houston pressed him to cite a case like those he's trying to prevent.

While Perry acknowledged that he wasn't aware of any specific examples, the West Texan contended nonetheless that the number of birth certificates that have been altered to reflect a different gender had soared 100 percent since 2019.

But Perry said that he did know of an instance when a transgender had "cleaned their clocks" in a race against females as a member of a track team in division two level competition at the collegiate level.

Whitmire chided Perry for having no "living breathing" examples of the kind of behavior that Patrick and the Senate Republicans want to outlaw. Quoting former Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, Whitmire said he was prepared to "stand here till hell freezes over" until Perry could muster up an actual case.

The transgender targeting measure died in the House in the 2021 regular session and a pair of special sessions this summer. The proposal faced an insurmountable obstacle in Democratic State Rep. Harold Dutton of Houston as the chairman of the Public Education Committee.

But after capitulating to the Senate on other bills that were based on fabricated claims like the new GOP voting restriction law, the House might have a bypass around the traditional process with the creation of a Select Committee on Youth Health & Safety that Republican Speaker Dade Phelan created for a third special session that got under way on Monday.

more to come ...