Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced on Wednesday that he is leading a coalition of 19 attorneys general in filing an amicus brief supporting the State of Indiana’s law prohibiting boys from playing on girls’ sports teams.
Presently, the state of Indiana’s law defines sex in actual reproductive biology rather than what gender someone chooses to identify themselves as. The Indiana law has been challenged on that basis and enjoined in federal district court.
“Indiana, like Alabama and most other states, determines the sex of an individual, including students, by their biology,” AG Marshall said in a statement. “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 biologically-based, time-tested—and eminently legal—view of sex is now being upended by those who seek to undermine this standard through gender ideology. But defining sex based on sex protects the rights of girls to fair competition in sports, and I am proud to take the side of Indiana in opposing this attack on common sense.”
Marshall and his fellow Republican attorneys general asserted in their brief that Indiana is victim to a proliferating litigation strategy targeting the definition of sex.
“This case is emblematic of an increasingly popular litigation strategy in which plaintiffs challenge States’ use of the traditional, biological definition of sex by arguing that the definition itself —not the attendant sex segregation—violates federal law,” the attorneys general wrote in their brief. “As is typical in this recent wave of litigation, here a State has enacted a law that adheres to the objective definition of sex that has endured for millennia, and the plaintiff advocates for something quite different: a definition of sex based on individuals’ subjective identities.”
“Compelling States to define sex according to gender identity jeopardizes States’ ability to enforce lawful sex-conscious policies,” Marshall stated. “Plus, paradoxically, requiring States to abandon an objective definition of sex may force many of them to resort to sex stereotyping as they search for other ways to define ‘boy’ and ‘girl.’ Federal law does not compel this outcome. Amici States have a strong interest in ensuring that federal law continues to permit a definition of sex that accords with reproductive biology and allows States to protect the health, safety, welfare, and privacy of all students.”
Marshall was joined by the attorneys general from Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia in filing the amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Judicial Circuit on September 13, 2022.
According to the court filing, the plaintiff in this case is a ten-year-old transgender girl whose birth-assigned sex was male. Since informing her family before she was four years old that she was a girl, she has been living as a girl and has consistently used her preferred female first name and dressed and appeared as a girl. A.M. has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria,1 receives medical treatment, and is currently taking a puberty blocker. In 2021, an Indiana state court entered an order changing the gender marker on A.M.’s birth certificate to female and changing her legal first name to her preferred female first name. A.M. is a rising fifth grader at one of the elementary schools within Defendant Indianapolis Public Schools (“IPS”), and her classmates know her only as a girl. Last school year, she played on an IPS girls’ softball team, but IPS has informed A.M.’s mother that because of Indiana Code § 20-33-13-4, A.M. will not be able to play on the girls’ softball team this year. A.M.’s mother has sued the state of Indiana, challenging their definition of gender.
In May, a federal judge blocked part of an Alabama law that made it a felony to prescribe gender-affirming puberty blockers and hormones to transgender minors.
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