TOPEKA - (February 13, 2023) - Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach today joined a coalition of 22 attorneys general in filing an amicus brief in support of Florida law that preserves girls’ sports for girls alone. The Florida law defines sex in terms of reproductive biology rather than “gender identity” and has been challenged on the basis in federal court.
“As the father of five girls who are involved in sports, I care deeply about preserving the opportunities provided by girls’ sports,” Kobach said. “I will resist every effort by the Left to allow biological males to compete in girls’ sports. It’s not fair, and it penalizes the girls who should rightly be winning those events, holding those records, and receiving those scholarships.”
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is leading the coalition of state attorneys general.
“Florida, like Alabama and most other states, determines the sex of an individual, including students, by their biology,” he said. “This definition has long served as the basis for state and federal laws protecting the rights of those individuals, in particular female students. Yet, this traditional, commonsensical, and eminently legal view of sex is now being upended by those who seek to replace it with radical ‘gender identity’ ideology. Defining ‘sex’ based on sex protects the rights of girls to fair competition in sports, and I am proud to stand with Florida in this important fight.”
While the attorneys general acknowledge in the amicus brief that “confusion is understandable” among courts as to how they should view these “novel challenges to well-settled understandings of sex,” the attorneys general emphasize that “the costs of continued confusion are high.” By confusing these sorts of claims with traditional sex-discrimination claims, federal courts have “forced many state and local governments to wade through years of litigation and employ costly experts to justify decisions as basic of giving a ‘Female’ designation on a driver’s license only to females or making a girls’ sports team available only to girls.”
Perversely, “compelling States to define sex according to gender identity would jeopardize States’ ability to enforce coherent sex-conscious policies. It may even force them to resort to sex stereotyping as they search to define ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ beyond biology.” But, as the attorneys general explain, “the Constitution compels none of this.”
The coalition of state attorneys general includes Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia. They filed the brief in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.