Tell our Senators: Vote NO on S.9, the GOP Child Predator Empowerment Act
Call BOTH of your Senators.
Call Script
My name is _______ and I am a constituent. My zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible.
I am calling to urge you to vote no on S.9, the GOP Child Predator Empowerment Act, the counterpart to H.R. 28. Government-mandated genital inspections create a huge problem without solving any real ones. A true Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act would address harassment and assault by unsavory men, especially coaches, instead of giving them new opportunities. I urge you to oppose S.9—vote no, add a poison pill, and filibuster it.
Background
S.9 is a bill to ban transgender women from playing sports, and it is coming up for a vote in the Senate on Monday. It has already passed the House. Democrats have been voting for a lot of horrible Republican legislation and cabinet nominees, so we need to pressure them to stop this bill.
Sports may not seem like a top-priority issue, but it is part of a broader strategy of dehumanization. Democrats have nicknamed it the "Child Predator Empowerment Act", because it "It puts a target on the back of every girl, every young woman who chooses to play sports—whether that’s tee ball to competitive collegiate athletes. Whatever the problem is we are trying to solve, the genital inspection of little girls is the wrong answer."
If you're worried about trans women being stronger in sports, know that it's never been unregulated. Sports leagues have required trans women to be on hormones at female levels, as verified by blood tests, for enough years that the male strength has melted away. One does not just self-identity and then compete against cis women. It's not really about protecting cis women.
Erin Reed summarizes it well: "The anti-trans right carefully crafted a strategy to use sports as a Trojan horse for a broader agenda of oppression. Sports were never the real issue—they’ve always been a way to get the foot in the door, to normalize placing an asterisk on the gender identity of transgender people. The notion that Democrats can ‘accept’ sports bans to appease those who wish us gone, or to prevent future anti-trans laws, is both naïve and dangerous. It concedes far more than a few trans kids playing soccer; it legitimizes the idea that transgender people are unequal under the law, creating the very framework the far right uses to fuel further attacks. In state after state, sports bans have been the first domino, laying the groundwork for the horrors inflicted by Republican legislatures. This isn’t compromise—it’s capitulation, and it’s a strategy that has already devastated transgender lives in 25 states."
The Republican fascists will not be satisfied with banning trans women from sports. This is just the first cobblestone of dehumanization that paves the way to conversion camps or worse. And it won't end with trans people.