On the Hugh Hewitt show yesterday, Congressman Chris Stewart (R., Utah) went after Governor Spencer Cox (R., Utah) for the latter’s recent veto of a ban on biological males in women’s sports. Stewart said:
The governor has really got to explain this to his constituents in Utah. It’s just so out of tune with what the vast majority of Utahans feel, and that is: we want to protect our kids, we want to protect women’s sports. We want to protect this idea that our values are not coming from some think tank in New York City. And it surprised a lot of us, his position on that.
It’s understandable that Representative Stewart, whose district went for Donald Trump by 16 points in 2020, wants to get on the right side of this issue. It certainly seems like the political momentum in his state favors protecting women’s sports: Just a few days after Cox’s veto, the Utah state legislature overrode the governor by a margin of 56 to 18 in the house and 21 to eight in the senate. The law is scheduled to go into effect on July 1.
But Stewart might want to look at his own legislative history on the issue before he throws any more stones at the governor. The Fairness for All Act (FFAA), which Stewart has repeatedly introduced in the House of Representatives and continues to push to this day, would likely undermine the very women’s-sports legislation that he’s supporting back in Utah. The all-Republican bill, which would write sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) into U.S. civil-rights law in exchange for meager “right to discriminate” protections for certain religious institutions, has been the subject of fierce social-conservative criticism — and for good reason. “The logical conclusion of this bill is the full abolition of sex-specific facilities,” Ethics & Public Policy Center president Ryan Anderson told me back in November. As I wrote in that piece:
Anderson says Stewart’s assertion that FFAA would allow for a plurality of approaches to single-sex spaces is “simply false,” given that the bill would condition the receipt of federal funds on the implementation of transgender-accommodating policies by adding SOGI to the list of protected classes in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. That would effectively ensure that biological males are granted access to women’s spaces in any activity or program that receives federal funding.
Moreover, the [bill]…ostensibly protects “sex segregation or sex-specific programming.” But as Anderson points out, those protections are undermined by the fact that in the same sentence, the bill specifies that sex should be determined on the basis of gender identity, allowing for sex segregation only insofar as “individuals are treated in accordance with their gender identity.” Similarly, sex-based privacy accommodations for students in publicly funded institutions are only acceptable “provided that . . . the accommodation does not exclude any student from such a facility to which the student has a right of access or otherwise prejudice any right or privilege protected under this title.”
In other words, Anderson says, “you can provide a student with greater privacy provided you don’t violate the rights that FFAA creates for trans-identifying students to access facilities that correspond with their gender identities.”
Stewart has vehemently denied that charge, telling me that the criticism is “just wrong” and that the bill is “mute” on the question of access to single-sex spaces. But it isn’t. I’m glad to hear the congressman affirm that legislators should be acting to protect women’s sports. I just wish he would heed his own advice.