Donald Trump in 2016. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
In what may be a worrying signal that he plans to limit the impact of last week’s landmark Supreme Court ruling protecting gay and transgender workers, Donald Trump has tweeted in support of an Idaho law that bans trans athletes from girls sports.
The Supreme Court ruled it is illegal to fire someone for being gay or trans – but a raft of anti-trans bills have been making their way through the legislature of various US states, and in Idaho it is now legal to bar a trans teenager from playing on a girls sports team.
A lawsuit challenging this law is being fiercely opposed by the US Justice Department, which is what Trump appeared to be supporting.
On Saturday (June 20), the US president retweeted an article from far-right website Breitbart headlined: “Sports: Justice Department Rejects SCOTUS Transgender Rule.”
“President Donald Trump’s justice department is defending women’s sports from an Idaho lawsuit by transgender activists — and from the Supreme Court’s new pro-transgender rule,” says the first line of the Breitbart article Trump shared.
It was confirmed Friday that the Trump administration would step in to the fray to support the anti-trans law, known as House Bill 500 and the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, on the basis that “allowing biological males to compete in all-female sports is fundamentally unfair to female athletes”.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr said in a statement: “Under the Constitution, the Equal Protection Clause allows Idaho to recognise the physiological differences between the biological sexes in athletics.
“Because of these differences, the Fairness Act’s limiting of certain athletic teams to biological females provides equal protection.
“This limitation is based on the same exact interest that allows the creation of sex-specific athletic teams in the first place — namely, the goal of ensuring that biological females have equal athletic opportunities.”
Idaho governor Brad Little is facing legal action for the law, with the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho calling it “hateful and unconstitutional”.
“Businesses, major employers, schools, doctors and counsellors have all warned that this law is terrible for Idaho,” the ACLU said.