Utah Governor Spencer Cox vetoed a bill Tuesday that would ban young transgender athletes from participating in girls’ sports.
However, Republican lawmakers plan to override the veto on Friday, Senator J. Stuart Adams, a Republican, said in a statement. statement†
Eleven other states have passed similar laws in recent years as sports participation by transgender girls and women becomes an increasingly divisive topic among political leaders and athletic organizations.
mr. Cox, a first-term governor to be re-elected in 2024, said in a statement: statement that although it would be “politically much easier and better for me to just sign the bill”, he chose to veto because he “tried to do what I think is the right thing, regardless of the consequences.”
Three state legislators — in Kansas, Louisiana and North Dakota — passed similar bills last year targeting transgender athletes that were ultimately rejected by their governors.
And on Monday, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb, a Republican, vetoed a similar bill, saying it would likely have been challenged in court and not solved an urgent problem.
Mr. Cox’s veto against the bill reflected divergent political and personal comparisons in a state still receptive to a moderate kind of Republicanism exemplified by Senator Mitt Romney, local political figures and analysts said.
Those factors included fears that anti-transgender legislation is bad for attracting and retaining businesses, Cox’s own history of being sensitive to LGBTQ concerns, and a frustration with lawmakers in his own party who caught him off guard on March 4 when they released a statement. last…minute version of the bill.
Republican state senators in Utah had sidestepped negotiations with LGBTQ rights advocates and state Democrats, who had spent weeks working on a compromise and thought the bill would be kept before the next term.
Instead, Republicans decided hours before the end of the session that only a complete ban on transgender athletes in youth sports would earn the minimum 15 votes needed to pass the bill.
The Utah House of Representatives later passed the amended bill.
State Senator Daniel McCay, who introduced and defended the proposed ban in the State Senate, said he was disappointed with the governor’s decision to veto. Mr. McCay, a Republican, said it was unfair for girls who identify with the gender assigned to them at birth to play against transgender girls.
He said of transgender young people, “Maybe that choice affects their availability to play competitive sports at a high school or collegiate level.”
Opponents of his bill disagreed, saying the measure was discriminatory and would negatively impact the mental health of transgender youth.
Mr Cox denounced the bill soon after it was passed. He had met with lawmakers weeks earlier and expressed his support for setting up a committee of experts to determine eligibility in individual cases. Some legislators and proponents of transgender rights also oppose that idea.
Instead, the bill that arrived on Mr. Cox’s desk completely banned “the male gender from competing against another school on a team dedicated to female students.” If a court declared the measure invalid, the expert committee would be set up.
After lawmakers passed the legislation, Mr Cox addressed the transgender community at a news conference and said, “We care about you. We love you. It’ll be fine.”
Troy Williams, the executive director of Equality Utah, an LGBTQ rights group, said the governor has been quick to defend and support the LGBTQ community in recent years, often at the risk of political backlash from his party.
The governor, he said, “helped us ban conversion therapy in the state” in 2020, when Mr. Cox was a lieutenant governor.
In 2016, Mr. Cox when he delivered a speech a day after 49 people were murdered at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and apologized for not treating gay students in his class in rural Utah “with the kindness, dignity and respect—the love – which they deserved.”
“My heart has changed,” he told the crowd. “It has changed because of you. It has changed because I have come to know many of you. You’ve been patient with me.”
But others said practical concerns and agendas also played a role.
Joshua Ryan, an associate professor of political science at Utah State University, said Mr. Cox and other moderate state lawmakers don’t want headlines about transgender-related legislation because the state’s tech industry has grown in recent years.
“I think the governor and a lot of other Republican lawmakers don’t want to get the attention of the national news media on some culture war issue,” he said.
Matthew Burbank, a professor of political science at the University of Utah, said the governor’s veto could also be a tactical response to being “completely left out of the picture.”
He added that “mixed messages” from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about being transgender complicate how people will respond. Utah has the largest population of Church members in the country.
While church leaders “do not take a position on the causes of people identifying as transgender,” according to the church’s website, they disapprove of the transition and will restrict church practices for those who do.
Giulia Heyward reporting contributed.
