WYOMING — The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wyoming issued a statement on Tuesday criticizing a letter Gov. Mark Gordon and eight other governors sent to the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) on Monday, which advocated for changes to the NCAA’s Transgender Student Athlete Policy.
The letter — signed also by the governors of Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas — urged the NCAA’s Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports to enforce rules based on the sex an individual is assigned at birth, rather than gender identity.
“The NCAA has the chance to guarantee an environment where female college athletes
can thrive without the concern of inequities,” the governors’ letter said. “We trust that you also want to guarantee just such an environment. But this policy allows the NCAA to avoid responsibility for ensuring the fairness of collegiate sports – therefore it must be changed…Science proves that it is fundamentally unfair for a biological male to compete against a biological female – that does not change when someone declares themselves as being of a different gender.”
In response, the ACLU of Wyoming referred to the governors’ letter as “little more than political grandstanding.”
“Whatever Gov. Gordon and this letter’s cosigners might say, this isn’t about leveling the playing field for student athletes or protecting fairness in women’s sports,” ACLU of Wyoming’s Deputy Executive Director Libby Skarin said in the statement. “If it were, these governors would be tackling the actual threats to women’s sports such as severe underfunding, lack of media coverage, sexist ideologies that suggest that women and girls are weak and pay equity for coaches and players.”
Skarin went on to denounce the letter as harmful.
“This letter to the NCAA is just another attempt to erase transgender people from society while stirring up support from their base of anti-trans activists with fear-mongering tactics and discriminatory rhetoric that harm some of the most vulnerable people in our state,” Skarin said.
The ACLU’s statement also pointed to Gordon’s seemingly contradictory criticism of Senate File 133, legislation that passed in Wyoming earlier this year that enforces similar adherence to separating students on school sports teams based on biological sex instead of gender identity. Gordon neither signed nor vetoed the legislation.
“Gordon said the ban was ‘overly draconian’ and ‘discriminatory without attention to individual circumstances or mitigating factors, and pays little attention to fundamental principles of equality,'” the statement says.
