Kris Kobach joins amicus brief defending athletic participation based on biological sex
(The Center Square) – Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is among 22 state attorneys general who want girls’ sports to be for biological females only.
Kobach was part of a coalition that filed…
(The Center Square) – Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is among 22 state attorneys general who want girls’ sports to be for biological females only.
Kobach was part of a coalition that filed an amicus brief on Tuesday in support of a Florida law that prevents biologically male athletes from participating in girls’ sports.
The Florida law, which does not base participation on gender identity, has been challenged in federal court.
“As the father of five girls who are involved in sports, I care deeply about preserving the opportunities provided by girls’ sports,” Kobach said in a press release issued by his office. “I will resist every effort by the Left to allow biological males to compete in girls’ sports. It’s not fair, and it penalizes the girls who should rightly be winning those events, holding those records, and receiving those scholarships.”
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is leading the coalition’s efforts.
He said that their challenge is based on fairness in athletics.
“Florida, like Alabama and most other states, determines the sex of an individual, including students, by their biology,” Marshall said in the release. “This definition has long served as the basis for state and federal laws protecting the rights of those individuals, in particular, female students. Yet, this traditional, commonsensical, and eminently legal view of sex is now being upended by those who seek to replace it with radical ‘gender identity’ ideology. Defining ‘sex’ based on sex protects the rights of girls to fair competition in sports, and I am proud to stand with Florida in this important fight.
The attorneys wrote in their amicus brief that “confusion is understandable” among courts when addressing “novel challenges to well-settled understandings of sex.”
They added that “the costs of continued confusion are high.” Additionally, they say that courts have confused these cases with traditional sex discrimination claims and have, “forced many state and local governments to wade through years of litigation and employ costly experts to justify decisions as basic of giving a ‘Female’ designation on a driver’s license only to females or making a girls’ sports team available only to girls.”
They added that, “compelling States to define sex according to gender identity would jeopardize States’ ability to enforce coherent sex-conscious policies. It may even force them to resort to sex stereotyping as they search to define ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ beyond biology.”
However, the attorneys general argue that the Constitution “compels none of this,” in their brief.
The attorneys general filed the brief in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
States that had attorneys general sign the amicus brief include: Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.