The Georgia Senate on Tuesday approved a hijacked Georgia House bill that cobbled together various Republican red-meat issues, including a proposed ban on transgender athletes playing sports and using restrooms that align with their gender identity, and preventing the teaching of sex education in schools before the sixth grade.
The Senate voted 31-21 to pass House Bill 1104, with Democrats voting against the measure.
The hijacking of legislation and tacking on several unrelated measures is typically done toward the end of a legislative session when lawmakers try to revive measures that didn’t gain traction. It also allows bills to skip the committee process of the other chamber.
HB 1104 began as a measure a first-term Democrat, state Rep. Omari Crawford of Decatur, sponsored to provide mental health and suicide prevention resources to student-athletes.
It now goes back to the House with a compilation of Republican-backed measures that had gone nowhere this session.
“This bill simply empowers parents and protects kids,” said Senate Education and Youth Chairman Clint Dixon, a Buford Republican.
The rewritten HB 1104 adds four sections. First, it would require schools to inform parents that they can receive emails about every book their child borrows from a school library. Supporters say the goal is to stop children from reading books with sexually explicit scenes or ones discussing gender identity.
In addition, HB 1104 would ban schools from teaching sex education to students before they are in sixth grade. It also would require parents to “opt in” if they wanted their child to receive sex education at all.
The revamped bill would ban transgender students from using bathrooms or locker rooms or play on teams that align with their gender identity. Republicans effectively banned transgender girls from sports in 2022 when they encouraged the Georgia High School Association to change its policy.
Credit: Courtesy photo
Credit: Courtesy photo
Crawford said while there is still a need for the version of HB 1104 that passed the House, he could not vote for the bill in its current form.
“If you have a piece of legislation that you feel strongly about, debate it on its own,” Crawford said. “Don’t put it into someone else’s bill where, at this point, coincidentally, the language that was added is probably going to exacerbate suicide rates.”
A study published in 2020 in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, a peer-reviewed publication that studies victims and perpetrators, found that 56% of transgender youths between ages 14 and 18 who were surveyed said they had tried to take their lives within the previous six months.
According to a 2019 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, 9% of high school students reported attempting suicide in the previous 12 months.
Dixon said he was aware of the statistics about transgender children and self-harm but that the changes he made to HB 1104 wouldn’t add to the problem.
“I mean, what about females?” Dixon said. “We need to protect females and the sanctity of their playing their sports. If males want to play sports, they need to play it with males.”
He shared the story of former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines, who tied for fifth place with a transgender woman during a 2022 race. She has since traveled the country speaking in support of bans similar to the one in HB 1104.
Dixon said he was unaware of any instances in which a female athlete committed self-harm after losing a competition to a transgender girl.
“I think about what happened to Riley Gaines at the collegiate level,” he said. “She was horrified by having to change in a changing room with a biological male that was claiming that he was transgender. And he was still fully intact with all the male parts.”
Democrats decried Republicans’ focus on a small portion of the state’s 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.
State Sen. Josh McLaurin, an Atlanta Democrat, compared his colleagues to bullies for legislation they’ve pushed and passed over the past several years regarding transgender children. He said that more left-leaning lawmakers have been accused of being “soft” and needing “safe spaces.”
“This will create the biggest safe space of them all,” he said. “And that is a safe space for a fraction of the public that doesn’t want to acknowledge the reality of trans people and LGBTQ people, generally, and so those people never have to confront the existence of those people and what it means. Instead, they can hide behind Georgia state law.”
HB 1104 now goes back to the House for its consideration.
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