Nebraska lawmakers on Friday declined to advance legislation to ban transgender student-athletes from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity, defeating the measure for the second consecutive year.
Legislative Bill 575, known as the Sports and Spaces Act, sought to prevent transgender students from using public school restrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity and to require schools to designate participation in athletics based on sex assigned at birth. The bill would have also redefined sex in a way that LGBTQ advocates warned would exclude transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
Conservatives in Nebraska’s unicameral Legislature failed to secure the votes necessary to overcome a filibuster on the bill, which was carried over from the previous session after it met a similar end last year.
Thirty-one state senators voted to end debate and vote on the measure, falling just two votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to end a filibuster. Two conservative senators abstained from voting.
With just four days left in the current session, the bill is effectively dead.
“I am disappointed that two of our Senators decided to not vote on the bill. I would have liked the opportunity to make adjustments,” state Sen. Kathleen Kauth, a conservative and the bill’s primary sponsor, told The Hill in an email after the vote.
Senators on both sides of the aisle during a four-hour debate Friday raised questions about the enforcement Kauth’s bill in its current form and whether its restrictions would inadvertently harm cisgender and transgender students alike.
“This bill is incomplete, and it needs to be reworked,” said state Sen. Tom Brandt, who declined to vote. “My fear is it’ll affect all female athletes.”
Additional concerns raised by Brandt and others pertained to whether the bill would require schools to construct additional restrooms and locker rooms for transgender students and whether taxpayers would be responsible for covering the cost of chromosome testing.
Kauth’s proposal defines “male” and “female” based on an individual’s chromosomes.
Lawmakers who opposed the bill on Friday largely decried it as an attack on transgender young people, citing elevated rates of depression, anxiety and suicide among transgender and gender non-conforming youth.
“We all know what this is about, no matter how we dress it up,” said state Sen. Lynne Walz. “It’s discrimination. It’s a blanket ban on trans kids participating in extracurricular activities.”
Kauth, who last year spearheaded a successful effort to restrict access to gender-affirming health care for transgender minors in Nebraska, told The Hill she is undeterred by Friday’s vote and plans to introduce the bill again in 2025.
“I will be bringing it back next session,” she said.
Laws that bar transgender student-athletes from competing on sports teams consistent with their gender identity have been adopted in at least 24 states since 2020, according to the Movement Advancement Project, though court orders are blocking the enforcement of laws passed in Arizona, Idaho, West Virginia and Utah.
At least 10 states have banned transgender people from using restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity in K-12 schools.