South Dakota Keeps Trans-Inclusive School Sports Policy

The body that governs high school sports in South Dakota has OK’d keeping a policy that allows transgender students to play on the teams of their choice, increasing the likelihood that conservative legislators will try to undermine it with a birth certificate requirement and possibly even genital exams.

The South Dakota High School Activities Association board of directors voted Thursday to maintain the policy it adopted last year, letting students request to play on the teams that match their gender identity rather than the gender on their birth certificates, the Associated Press reports. So far no transgender student has made a request citing the policy.

Some state legislators recently said they’d prefer a policy requiring that students play on teams reflecting the gender on their birth certificates, and one of them, Republican Rep. Roger Hunt, wants visual exams of students to determine gender as well. A legislative committee has requested a draft of a bill to that effect; some committee members urged waiting until the activities association’s board had met.

Now the board has met, and while it gave a preliminary OK to some minor changes, such as having an independent hearing officer rather than a committee evaluate students’ requests to play on a given team, it left the basic policy intact.

“I do hope that this helps [lawmakers] understand that we are listening to them and their concerns,” said board member Linda Whitney, according to the AP. “We’re trying to revise it because our member schools have indicated to us, and we serve member schools, that they want us to have a policy.” If the legislature enacts a birth certificate requirement, she added, the board would abide by it.

Some lawmakers said they want no less than that, although attempts to pass such a bill failed in the last session. “It’s an issue that I don’t think will go away because it involves a contradiction of an official state document by minors,” Rep. Jim Bolin, a Republican who supports such a requirement, told the AP.

Advocates for transgender rights vowed they would resist efforts to repeal the policy. “We will fight this until trans kids are just called kids,” Kendra Heathscott, head of transgender services at the Center for Equality in Sioux Falls, told the news service.