Gov. DeSantis should meet with transgender children

Gov. Ron DeSantis has a moral obligation to meet with transgender kids and their families before acting on the cruel transgender youth sports ban surreptitiously passed in the final days of Florida’s legislative session. He must show the courage Republican leadership lacked in rushing through the state’s first explicitly anti-LGBTQ law in decades.

Republican leaders tacked the ban onto an unrelated charter schools bill in the eleventh hour of legislation session. They did it with hardly an hour’s notice and no opportunity for public comment. They side-stepped the public accountability and vetting of a Senate committee hearing on the policy. Dozens of advocates were ready to speak out. Instead, they were sidelined like the transgender youth under this bill.

Now, it’s incumbent upon the governor to face that accountability and have the conversations legislative leaders dodged. Sports teach us about winning with humility and taking ownership of our losses. Here, someone owes it to transgender middle schoolers to look them in the eyes and say, “You cannot play on your team anymore because of this law.” Someone needs to tell transgender elementary schoolers, “There is no path forward for you in sports because of this law.” That someone is Gov. DeSantis.

Even lawmakers who previously called themselves LGBTQ allies capitulated to extremists. Privately, they criticized the bill, but they fell in line when it came time to vote. They did it for cheap political points. They attacked transgender youth in a campaign cooked up in part by The Heritage Foundation, a national, rightwing think tank with the goal of turning out its far-right base.

But they don’t get to pawn off responsibility for it and leave parents to tell their kids that they’re no longer welcome on their teams.

This blanket ban is the most cruel and anti-LGBTQ law passed since the day we formed Equality Florida in 1997. It bans transgender kids as young as middle school from playing sports with their friends and will kick kids off of teams that they currently play on. The Florida High School Athletics Association and the NCAA have already had policies in place for nearly a decade that allow transgender students to play sports; in that time, there have been zero complaints. This puts a target on the backs of vulnerable children just trying to live their lives. Even the professor whose research was used to prop up the House version of the bill, Doriane Coleman of Duke University School of Law, came out expressly against the legislation.

DeSantis says he’d be proud to follow the lead of conservative-led states like Mississippi and West Virginia in signing this hateful legislation. Maybe he wouldn’t follow the Legislature’s haste if he heard from those who are directly impacted. Maybe he hasn’t thought about the critical life lessons that sports teach young people. Maybe he doesn’t know that nearly half of all transgender youth contemplate suicide. Being transgender isn’t a risk factor in itself, but things like family rejection are, and policies like this reinforce those harms.

Hateful attacks on transgender youth are spreading across our state. Hundreds of homophobic protestors have been flooding Florida school board meetings, demanding an end to policies that protect and support transgender students. They’ve used bullhorns to scream at LGBTQ students and families. They have disrupted meetings by shouting anti-transgender messages.

We know our transgender youth are marginalized and misunderstood. It can be hard to understand that experience if you aren’t or don’t personally know someone transgender. But that also doesn’t excuse using transgender kids as a political sword in a culture war.

If public support for this policy was as high as its backers claim it to be, then it shouldn’t have to be fast-tracked through the process and secretly maneuvered to the goal line. Sports teaches us about fairness and humility. This legislation’s history was the exact opposite.

One of the main cheerleaders for the transgender youth sport ban was Republican state Rep. Randy Fine. When one of his Democratic colleagues asked why the Republicans sought to direct funding in a particular way in a different bill, he flippantly replied “because we can.”

That arrogance and disregard for opposing viewpoints was a hallmark of this legislative session. We should expect better from our lawmakers. We should expect better for our transgender youth. I invite the governor to be better. He should veto this needless and harmful legislation. And at minimum, he should hear out transgender kids and their families before depriving them of the opportunities we value for other young people.