“In Florida, women are going to play women sports activities and boys are going to play boys sports activities,” DeSantis stated, talking at a non
“In Florida, women are going to play women sports activities and boys are going to play boys sports activities,” DeSantis stated, talking at a non-public college in Jacksonville.
The Republican governor made a present of signing the invoice on Tuesday by highlighting a well known instance of transgender highschool sprinters from Connecticut besting their competitors on the monitor.
DeSantis, flanked by pupil athletes from the Jacksonville-based Trinity Christian Academy on stage, streamed a video of transgender athlete Terry Miller profitable a race in 2019, then launched considered one of her opponents, Selina Soule, to handle the viewers. Soule, a Connecticut highschool monitor athlete who has been outspoken towards permitting transgender athletes to compete, instructed the group her expertise dropping to transgender women was “irritating” and “demoralizing.”
DeSantis has signed right into a legislation a slate of conservative-leaning payments from the GOP-led Legislature, together with measures cracking down on Large Tech, loosening Covid restrictions and tightening voting guidelines, forward of his reelection and attainable bid for the White Home in 2024.
Some 11 transgender athletes have utilized since 2013-14 beneath the Florida Excessive College Athletic Affiliation’s participation coverage, which permits college students to petition to play sports activities whatever the gender listed on their delivery certificates. Democrats tried to make use of this rule for instance that the legislation was pointless in Florida. The one in-state occasion of transgender athletes that lawmakers might reference throughout session concerned bowling.
Democrats on Tuesday had been fast to notice how DeSantis signed the laws on the primary day of LGBTQ Satisfaction Month, a transfer Democratic Agriculture commissioner and sure 2022 gubernatorial candidate Nikki Fried stated was “particularly merciless.”
“By signing a heartless ban on transgender children in sports activities, Governor DeSantis is marginalizing a whole group,” Fried stated in a press release. “Florida ought to stand for inclusivity, equality, and liberty — not peddling hate for political factors.”
When requested, DeSantis stated the timing behind the invoice signing had nothing to do with Satisfaction Month.
“It’s not a message to something apart from saying we’re going to guard equity in girls’s sports activities,” DeSantis stated.
Shortly after DeSantis signed the measure, the Human Rights Marketing campaign pledged to problem the laws in court docket, claiming it’s “fueled by discriminatory intent and never supported by reality.” The American Civil Liberties Union is difficult the same legislation that lawmakers lately handed in West Virginia.