(ReclaimingAmerica.net) – The 2024 GOP presidential nomination hopeful Ron DeSantis has dealt a massive new blow to the implementation of transgender ideology as a federal judge has rejected a lawsuit by a “trans woman” against the Florida governor’s law explicitly banning males from women’s and girls’ sports.
On Tuesday, US District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida, Roy Altman, snubbed a legal challenge to Florida’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, initiated by the DeSantis administration in 2021.
The ruling has delivered a win for Governor Ron DeSantis and a setback for transgender athletes who wish to participate in female sports teams, The Washington Times notes in a report.
The lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of D.N., a transgender volleyball player, sought to overturn the 2021 law mandating that public high school and college athletes compete under their sex assigned at birth rather than their alleged “gender identity.”
“Today, we were asked whether a law that separates public-school sports teams by biological sex violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. We find that it does not,” Judge Altman stated in his 39-page opinion.
Legal representatives for D.N., a high school student in Broward County, claimed the law, known as Senate Bill 1028, was discriminatory towards transgender students.
However, Altman, a Trump appointee, concluded that gender-based classifications do not inherently contravene the Equal Protection Clause.
“In our case, SB 1028’s gender-based classifications are rooted in real differences between the sexes — not stereotypes. In requiring schools to designate sports-team memberships on the basis of biological sex, the statute adopts the uncontroversial proposition that most men and women do have different (and innate) physical attributes,” the judge writes.
He concludes that “the law, after all, doesn’t discriminate against transgender students,” as cited by The Daily Caller.
“In addition to allowing transgender athletes of both sexes to play on coed (or mixed) teams, the law explicitly allows transgender boys to try out and play for boys’ sports teams. If the law had intended to discriminate against transgender student-athletes, in other words, it’s done a very poor job of it,” Altman elaborates.
This ruling emerges amid a broader national legal contest waged by transgender rights organizations against statutes that prevent athletes born male from competing on female school teams based on gender identity.
The US Supreme Court may eventually decide this contentious issue.
