A federal court in Arizona ruled on Monday that two boys who identify as transgender girls must be allowed to play school sports on the teams that align with their gender identity.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, California, agreed with the claim made by attorneys for the transgender athletes that barring them from playing on the girls team violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, according to ABA Journal.
With their ruling, the San Francisco-based court has blocked Arizona from enacting its Arizona’s Save Women’s Sports Act while the lawsuits for the trans athletes continue. The act prevents athletes born male from playing on a girls school team.
Judge Morgan Christen, an Obama appointee, said that the Save Women’s Sports Act is too broad.
“The act’s transgender ban applies not only to all transgender women and girls in Arizona, regardless of circulating testosterone levels or other medically accepted indicia of competitive advantage, but also to all sports, regardless of the physical contact involved, the type or level of competition or the age or grade of the participants,” Judge Christen wrote in the majority opinion. “Heightened scrutiny does not require narrow tailoring, but it does require a substantial relationship between the ends sought and the discriminatory means chosen to achieve them.”
Both transgender athletes in these cases — one aged 12, the other 16 — had gone through male puberty, but were taking testosterone blockers to “transition” as females.
The 9th Circuit also held that before puberty there is no difference in athletic performance between girls and boys in sports.
Rachel Berg, a lawyer with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which is representing the athletes, was exultant over the ruling.
“The 9th Circuit recognized that the law is unconstitutional because it’s a categorical ban on all transgender girls from playing on school sports teams,” Berg told the media. “It does so regardless of their individual circumstances. The 9th Circuit recognized that just because somebody is transgender tells you nothing about whether they have an athletic advantage.”
Tom Horne, Arizona’s State Superintendent of Schools, blasted the 9th Circuit as “very left-wing” and said they would take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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