South Dakota’s governor of the GOP on Friday refused to sign a bill from lawmakers in her own party that would ban transgender girls from participating in women’s high school sports.
In a statement released on Twitter, Noem said she was returning the bill for change to lawmakers, and indicated she thinks the ban should not be extended to college athletes.
“Unfortunately, the fact that I have studied this legislation and met with legal experts over the past few days has become concerned that the vague and too broad language of this bill could have significant unintended consequences,” Noem wrote.
“I am also concerned that the approach taken by House Bill 1217 is unrealistic in the context of collegiate athletics,” she added, writing that the ban on transgender athletes from collegiate sports would cause conflict with national athletics associations in college.
Republicans in the state legislature who supported the bill called Noem’s attempt to force them to make changes to the legislation “inappropriate.”
“Legislators are the ones who draft the laws and the governor signs them,” State Representative Rhonda Milstead (R), who sponsored the bill, told Sioux Falls’ Argus leader. “She’s working on the bill and writing a new law, and that’s not her job.”
As currently written, the bill would require students to submit a form confirming their age, biological gender and lack of steroid use to be eligible for high school athletics programs.
An analysis of the Human Rights Campaign earlier this month found that lawmakers in more than half of the states in the union are currently considering bills that would somehow restrict access to sport or health care for transgender people.