Red State Voters Support Anti-Trans Laws. Their Lawmakers Are Delivering – By Mary Radcliffe and Kaleigh Rogers (FiveThirtyEight) / Apr 18 2023
For a time in recent memory, it looked like Utah might be an outlier among red states. While other states moved to prohibit transgender students from competing in girls’ sports, a Utah state Senate committee refused to move forward with such a ban in 2021. Lawmakers in the Beehive State spent months working to find a compromise on legislation around transgender students’ participation in sports, hearing from advocates on all sides of the issue.
But then Republicans in the state legislature suddenly scrapped the compromise efforts and passed a full ban on trans students’ participation in girls’ sports. Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, vetoed the legislation, but the state legislature voted to override it. While that specific ban has since been overturned by a state judge, Utah has passed new laws this year — at least six, each signed by the governor — targeting transgender individuals, more than any other state this legislative session, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis. They include laws that ban gender-affirming care for minors, make it harder to change a birth certificate and make it more difficult for transgender athletes to participate in school sports.
Utah is one of at least 14 states that have passed new laws this year aimed at placing restrictions on transgender individuals — typically trans kids, specifically — as well as their parents and health care providers, including sports bans, bans against gender-affirming care and laws requiring students to use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender they were assigned at birth.
