A familiar foe is reportedly behind the bills attacking transgender youth introduced in more than 20 states this year.
According to an NBC News report, legislation put forward in states like Arizona, Kansas, Mississippi, and Montana strongly resembles Idaho’s House Bill 500. Signed into law by Republican Gov. Brad Little in March 2020, the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act” prohibits transgender girls from competing in school sports in alighment with their gender identity. The proposals, for instance, all reference the same section of a 2019 Washington Post op-ed co-authored by former tennis champion Martina Navratrilova.
The Idaho bill was authored by state Rep. Barbara Ehardt (R-Idaho Falls), who previously confirmed that she partnered with ADF to write HB 500. In 2020, she told Bloomberg Law that she reached out to the right-wing legal powerhouse, which the Human Rights Campaign once called the “nation’s largest anti-LGBT legal advocacy group,” because she “couldn’t get the language correct.” Luckily, she said she was able to pattern the bill after ADF’s own model legislation.
“Nobody had any legislation like this,” Ehardt is quoted as saying. “No one had anything that would work.”
The conservative lawmaker also happened to be on hand when Montana debated its own version of HB 500 in January. “If you don’t pass legislation such as this, it will come to the day where there will be no room, no place, for girls and women to compete,” said Ehardt, in comments quoted by the Idaho newspaper Post Register.
Kate Oakley, state legislative director and senior counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, said the linkage between these bills is proof that they are “not being demanded by constituents.”
“Legislators in several states have openly admitted that there is no problem happening in their states that needs addressing,” Oakley told them. “While ADF wants to use transgender kids as their latest political scare tactic, state legislators should understand that their consistuents — including a large majority of Trump voters — believe transgender people should be allowed to live freely and openly and that the only thing these bills will do is harm kids who are simply trying to navigate their adolesence.”
That ADF would be the source for transphobic legislation isn’t surprising, as the organization has been helping to push proposals targeting trans youth for years. In 2016, Mother Jones reported that anti-trans bathroom bills introduced in Kansas, Minnesota, Nevada, and North Carolina “mirrored or even copied” a 2014 letter ADF sent to schools opposing affirming bathroom access for transgender students.
The following year, NBC News reported that bathroom bills in 15 states pulled directly from the “Student Physical Privacy Act,” a piece of model legislation drafted by ADF in 2015. Many of the bills even kept the same name.
After the overwhelming majority of those proposals failed to become law, ADF moved on from the restroom issue to trans participation in sports. The Scottsdale, Arizona-based group is behind a Connecticut lawsuit seeking to prevent two Black transgender athletes, Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, from competing in women’s track and field. The ADF claims that allowing trans girls to participate in alignment with their sense of self would violate Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bans sex-based discrimination in federally funded education programs.
But Kasey Suffredini, CEO and national campaign director for the advocacy group Freedom for All Americans, said that ADF’s interest in the subject has little to do with Title IX or “saving women’s sports,” as the copycat bills are frequently titled. He said it’s about “exploiting anti-transgender stereotypes” to impede LGBTQ+ equality at any cost.
“These state-level attacks are a last-ditch attempt by the Alliance Defending Freedom and other opponents of LGBTQ equality to chip away at support for all LGBTQ people,” Suffredini told them. “It is a coordinated effort to make it impossible for young transgender people to simply play on a team, make friends, and/or get the care that they need — and to reduce support for and understanding of transgender people overall.”
ADF has a long track record of fighting against equal rights for queer and transgender people. The organization has been lobbying in favor of anti-LGBTQ+ bills at state legislatures since at least the early 2000s, when HRC reports that it authored same-sex marriage bans in states like Colorado, Idaho, and South Carolina. ADF also drafted a “religious freedom” bill vetoed by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer in 2014 that would have allowed businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ+ customers and has fought to preserve laws criminalizing gay sex.
Most famously, ADF defended Colorado baker Jack Phillips, who turned away a gay couple seeking a wedding cake on the basis of his Christian beliefs. The Supreme Court ruled narrowly in Phillips’ favor in a 7-2 decision.
Jennifer Pizer, law and policy director for Lambda Legal, said its track record shows that ADF has been “vigorously amplifying the nastiest, most defamatory of anti-LGBTQ nonsense” for years. She noted that the organization has been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “hate group.”
“Overseas, where our transgender friends and family members have even less legal protection than here in the U.S., ADF has been calling for them to be subject to state-sanctioned sterilization,” Pizer told them. “And that ugly zealotry is on full display in this year’s spate of bills again targeting trans young people, who are among our most vulnerable and who deserve inclusion and support, not these confused, misguided legislative attacks.”
When reached for comment, ADF did not deny playing a role in authoring 2021’s spate of anti-trans bills, which now numbers over 31 pieces of legislation. “As is typical practice for legal organizations, Alliance Defending Freedom is often asked by legislators to review possible legislation and offer advice,” ADF attorney Matt Sharp told NBC News.
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