Atlanta resident Kim Siders told a panel of Georgia senators that she couldn’t understand why the Legislature has spent so much of its time — including holding committee hearings between legislative sessions — focusing on transgender children.
In preparation for Thursday’s hearing of the Senate Special Committee on Protecting Women’s Sports, Siders said she researched what other states have done in recent years on the issue and what was making legislation around transgender children such a “hot topic.” The Atlanta resident, who has a transgender daughter, said she came across a quote in a news article from Terry Schilling, president of the conservative advocacy group American Principles Project, that helped her understand.
“After gay marriage was resolved, we knew we needed an issue that candidates were comfortable talking about, and we threw everything at the wall,” Siders paraphrased Schilling’s quote. “What stuck, somewhat unexpectedly, is the issue of transgender identity, particularly among young people.”
Georgia has been part of a movement among conservative states that passed or proposed laws regulating transgender children and adults.
In 2023, the Georgia General Assembly passed a law banning doctors from giving certain treatments to transgender children. The year before, it tasked athletic associations with investigating whether there was a need to ban transgender girls from competing on girls’ sports teams. The Georgia High School Association voted to require athletes to compete based on their biological sex, effectively banning transgender athletes from participating based on gender identification.
The day after Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s gender came into question following her defeat of an Italian boxer this summer in the Paris Olympics, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones created the panel to look into transgender kids playing sports in Georgia. Khelif is not transgender.
Jones, a potential 2026 candidate for governor, has said he will prioritize passing a bill that would put into law the policy implemented by the GHSA. Lawmakers and advocates said they are unaware of any transgender athletes playing in public high schools before or after the rule took effect, but state lawmakers often push through legislation on the possibility something “could” happen.
Thursday was the third of what is expected to be four legislative hearings on the topic that, until this week, had almost exclusively featured testimony from conservative groups and surrogates for Republican President-elect Donald Trump. Chairman Greg Dolezal, a Republican from Cumming, said he expects the committee to meet again in the coming weeks to put forth recommended legislation for next year.
State Sen. Clint Dixon, a Duluth Republican who sponsored the legislation that banned certain treatments for transgender children, said he is adamant about keeping “biological males” out of girls bathrooms and locker rooms.
“I come back to it very simply,” Dixon said. “Selfishly, as a father of two young daughters, we’ve got to protect women. We’ve got to protect their sports. We’ve got to protect them in changing rooms.”
Dixon relayed testimony given earlier this year by five former collegiate swimmers who said they were forced to compete against Lia Thomas, a transgender woman, in 2022. The swimmers told senators they still suffer emotional damage because they had to “compete against a man” and because Thomas exposed “full male genitalia,” in the locker room. Former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines said she equated that to “sexual harassment.”
“It was so horrific for them to witness that some of them ended up changing in storage closets,” Dixon said. “Some of them waited until that athlete left the room, having them miss some of their competition.”
Siders asked senators to reconsider their efforts to continue to regulate transgender children, noting that public discussions of policies targeting transgender people statistically lead to higher incidents of self-harm in the small population. According to a 2022 study by the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, about 1.2% of Georgians between the ages of 13 and 17 identify as transgender, or about 8,500 minors.
Studies have found that transgender people consider suicide at a rate exponentially higher than those who are not transgender.
Siders said while she tries to keep the discussion from her daughter, two years ago her daughter learned from her friends that the state was planning to limit certain treatments to transgender minors.
“This sent her spiraling into anxiety and depression,” she said. “I won’t sugarcoat it. She had thoughts of not being alive. And when we asked her why, she’s like, ‘The laws.’ She’s like, ‘I know that there are people out there’ — and by out there, which means in here — ‘that would be happier if I didn’t exist.’ So bringing these (college swimmers) up, making it a platform, making it the topic of conversation in the public sphere, hurts these kids, whether these bills pass or not.”
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