MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Lawmakers in Alabama are moving forward with legislation that would strictly define who is considered female and male based on their reproductive systems. Opponents said the measure could erode the rights of transgender and intersex people in the state.
“There are only two genders, and each individual is either male or female,” according to the bill approved in committee on Tuesday.
It defines sex based on reproductive anatomy and says schools and local governments can designate single-sex spaces such as bathrooms based on those definitions. A House committee plans to pass similar legislation on Wednesday.
The bills are part of a wave of legislation in Republican states that aims to regulate which restrooms transgender people use, which school sports teams they can play on, and ban gender-affirming medical care such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy, especially for minors.
“I’m here today to stand up for women’s rights,” said Republican Senator April Weaver, the bill’s sponsor. She said the definitions will guide courts in interpreting existing laws and “codify the time-honored definitions of man, woman, woman, man, boy, girl, mother, father and sex.”
The bill defines a woman as someone who, apart from an accident or abnormality, has a “reproductive system that produces eggs at some point” and a man as someone who, apart from an accident or abnormality, has a “reproductive system that produces eggs at some point” produces sperm at some point. ” The bill requires any state-sponsored entity that collects information about sex to “identify each individual as male or female at birth.”
At a public hearing, opponents said the legislation is part of ongoing attacks on transgender people’s rights to go about their daily lives.
“I’m here to say that I’m literally just a woman. I am also transgender. People like me have always existed… and it’s okay for us to exist,” Allison Montgomery told the County and Municipal Government Committee.
Montgomery said what advocates are aiming for would mean that men who have “used testosterone for years and developed a full beard” would be required to use women’s toilets because their bodies once produced eggs.
It is not clear how the proposal will affect people who are considered intersex, or who are born with a combination of male and female biological traits. The commission added that sex may be classified as unknown in state records “when sex cannot be medically diagnosed for developmental or other reasons.”
The legislation is at odds with decades of medical research showing that gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure, and that sexual anatomy does not always correspond to the chromosomes and genes that cause most people to develop and identify as male or woman.
The measure would create a vague exception for people with intersex conditions — saying that individuals with congenital or medically verifiable differences in sex development “must be accommodated” in accordance with federal law — while declaring that such people “are not a third sex ‘.
Research shows that the U.S. population of intersex people, born with physical characteristics that do not match typical definitions of male and female, is even larger than that of transgender people.
A supporter of the bill, Becky Gerritson, executive director of the Eagle Forum of Alabama, said the definitions would provide guidance to the courts.
“This bill will help preserve those spaces for men and women that ensure privacy, safety and equal opportunity,” Gerritson said.
Democratic Senators Linda Coleman-Madison of Birmingham and Merika Coleman of Pleasant Grove questioned the bill’s necessity.
“This is just so heartbreaking. We spend all this time trying to keep people down who aren’t like us. It’s sad,” Coleman-Madison said.