JUST IN: Ron DeSantis Bans Transgender Girls From Women's Sports On First Day Of LGBTQ Pride Month

[Applause] well good morning i want to thank trinity christian academy um and pastor messer for for hosting us here today i actually went to because they did the state championship football at dope campbell stadium in tallahassee and so i went to the class 3a football championship but i had to go back i couldn't stay the whole game and so i was like you all won right and they're like yeah we won the state championship so it was really good i got to speak to the team before the game and we're really proud of of the sports season as a whole because these are kids that have worked really hard to be able to have this opportunity and to win a state championship is something they'll always remember heck even to compete for one is a big deal and what i told them was just reminded when we were meeting with folks beforehand what i told them then was true if they had been in california they would have been on their couch because they would not have been able to even be allowed to compete in any type of sports and so we're proud that we not only i know they finished the school year here we were just in baker county you know we had school year we had sports we did everything that was obviously the right decision i think the places that lock the kids out of sports and lock the kids out of school i mean it's just a total disaster and they're going to have to i think pay the consequences of those decisions for for years and years to come we've got a great team of folks here we have our lieutenant governor in attendance we have senator kelly stargell aaron bean jen bradley a lot of representatives kaylee tuck chris litvala stan mclean cord bird jason fisher chuck brannon wyman duggan and clay yarborough we also have selena sole who's a former connecticut high school track athlete who is going to talk about the bill that we had today and how the lack of protections in her state ended up denying her opportunities to be able to compete we believe in the state of florida of protecting the fairness and the integrity of women's athletics being able to compete in a variety of sports in florida fortunately has opportunities across a wide range of sports and we're very competitive in a number of different sports provides our young girls with opportunities that that really teach them lessons that last a lifetime and i think the same is true for all of our sports certainly was true for me uh growing up here in the state of florida being able to compete and it took me to college it's taken many of our girls to college to be able uh to get an education and to compete so we believe that it's very important that uh that the integrity of those competitions are preserved that these opportunities are protected and i can tell you this in florida you know girls are going to play girls sports and boys are going to play boys sports that's what we're doing and we're going to make sure that that's the reality so the bill that we're doing today will ensure fairness for women athletes for years to come in the state of florida it says that athletic teams or sports that are designated for females are open to females and we're going to go based off biology not based off ideology when we're doing sports the bill defines a student's biological sex based on the student's official birth certificate at the time of birth and as part of the bill we're signing today we're not only making sure women have opportunities for scholarships and competition at the highest level we're also putting in statute ways to actually vindicate the rights of any women athletes who may be discriminated against so moving forward any student who's deprived of an athletic opportunity as a result of a violation of this law will have the right to civil remedies any school or public post secondary institution that suffers direct or indirect harm as a result of a violation of this bill including by a governmental entity accrediting organization or athletic association can also pursue civil remedies any student who's subject to retaliation as a result of reporting a violation of this bill can also pursue civil remedies and so we're not just setting a standard we're also providing ways where that fairness and the equality can be enforced on behalf of our girls and our women athletes and so one of the reasons why i think this has become an issue is because we've seen particularly in other states you would have these blatantly unfair track races and all these other things where these girls train and then they end up not being able to advance to compete in state or or what have you so actually have a quick video so we're going to part the part the red sea here for a minute show the video and then i'm going to have selena soul come up and talk about her story out of the 100 is in lane five chelsea mitchell in lane six mitchell ended up the 100 meter champion after the fall start michelle smith in seven carly swire button eight jillian mars second in the 400 is in nine here comes terry miller miller after the fall start in the one takes the 200 24 low terry miller of bloomfield in five the overwhelming favorite alana smith is in six emily mulhern in seven selena sewell in eight megan wasik in nine and as expected it is miller and then smith 11 6 4. she just broke her own stayed open yikes so you i think you see in those races i mean you know you have all those all those girls who are who are competing and you know it just wasn't a level playing field um it wasn't fair and selena is um is here from connecticut and she's going to talk about how this has impacted her opportunities and so selena come on [Applause] my name is selena sol and i'm a track and field athlete from connecticut you may know my story but if you don't i'd like to share how a bad policy in my state of connecticut has robbed me my teammates as well as every other female track athlete in my state the opportunity to compete on a fair and level playing field i have been competing in track and field since my mom introduced it to me when i was a little girl track means everything to me i would wake up every morning eager to get on the track waiting to run waiting to jump i love my sport i've spent countless hours trying to shave fractions of a second off of my time so i could be the best because i raced to win but my chances of being first of being the best were shattered in 2017 connecticut began allowing two male athletes to self-identify as girls to compete in girls sports during all four years of high school i was forced to compete against them even though they were bigger stronger and faster than me because they were male in just three years these two athletes won 15 women's championship titles and they set 17 new individual meet records records which we girls had no hope of breaking i remember what it was like to line up for the race and get into my blocks already knowing the outcome long before the race started those two biological males would dominate the field leaving us girls to compete for third place and beyond no matter how hard we trained and how hard we pushed ourselves they beat us time and time again we elite female athletes don't give up a normal high school experience just for participation trophies we race to win sports have always had separate rules to ensure fairness everyone should have the chance to participate in sports but they need to compete where it's most fair this isn't about self-expression this is about our right a woman's right to win i have lost countless opportunities over the past few years i lost opportunities to compete on world-class tracks and opportunities to win titles during my junior year i was denied the chance to compete at the regional new england championships i missed advancing to the next level of competition in the 55-meter dash by just two spots two spots that were taken by biological males it was frustrating heartbreaking and demoralizing to be sidelined in my own sport female athletes deserve the same opportunity as boys to excel and chase our dreams allowing male athletes to compete in girls sports shatters those dreams and strips away opportunities that so many of us have spent years working to obtain we must protect the integrity of women's sports so i decided to take actions three of my fellow female athletes and i filed a lawsuit last year with the alliance defending freedom against the connecticut interscholastic atlas athletic conference because girls and women deserve the chance to compete on a fair playing field after reviewing the fairness and women's sports act all i can say on behalf of all female athletes is thank you governor [Music] as someone who was one of the first to start speaking against this injustice it is very encouraging that my story has reached people across the country and that many have seen what's happened in connecticut and want to take the stand to protect female athletes in their state and to protect women's sports so no other young girl has to go through the same pain and heartbreak i had to endure my four years of high school i am grateful to florida lawmakers and especially governor desantis for preserving fairness in women's sports and allowing countless young girls and women the opportunity to succeed in the sport that they love as a female athlete i recognize the opportunities for higher competition are limited including access to college recruitment scholarship funds equal access to facilities coaches training opportunities and even opportunities to play professionally even decades after title ix this bill is about protecting the advances we've already made as women in this space and creating a fair opportunity to empower women to aspire and to achieve in the most fair way possible i only wish the rest of the country would take these obvious steps to ensure fairness and equality for women and girls like me once again thank you governor desantis well i want to thank selena for coming down here from connecticut i know she's in college and she's actually figuring out maybe she can transfer to a school in florida so we're if you're out there and you're doing women's track and any of the coaches at our state universities you may want to give her a call so we'll uh we'll be happy to help with that so i want to thank the legislators for uh for providing these protections you know when this was going on you heard different things being said about you know some of these corporations get all spun up uh some of these organizations say they're not going to hold events if you do this and just let me say very clearly in florida we're going to do what's right we'll stand up to corporations they are not going to dictate the policies in this state we will stand up to groups like the ncaa who think that they should be able to dictate the policies in different states not here not ever and so we won't be cowed we will stand strong and here's the thing at the end of the day if the price of providing opportunities that can last a lifetime for all the girls throughout the state of florida for ensuring fair competition for them if the price of that is that we lose an event or two you know i would choose to protect our young girls every day of the week and twice on sunday so we have the legislature legislators who were the the sponsors of the bill and so i want to invite up senator kelly stargell who helped shepherd this through the florida senate [Applause] thank you thank you very much governor for being here thank you for signing this hard-fought bill you know many as we did this bill through the process tried to make it about something that it wasn't this bill is very simply about making sure that women can safely compete have opportunities and and physically be able to excel in a sport that they've trained for prepared for and worked for i don't think this is a place that selena ever thought she would be or even desired to be to try to work on something like it's such a common sense issue and it's unfortunate that it's become lost in the rhetoric of the day that what we're dealing with this is nothing about anybody being discriminated against it's solely so that women have an opportunity to compete in women's sports we all know that men are stronger than women watching the video i kept thinking to myself i've always heard as a kid you run like a girl and when you're looking at that video it's even evident the the the woman the the transgender woman who who competed or or a self-identified woman ran very differently than the others in the competition it's physiologically different their men are stronger they have bigger longer capacity stronger muscles it's common sense and governor i appreciate you working with us to com to push this issue forward it was a difficult issue it's the right issue it's the right thing to work for and this emerging issue to make sure that we protect our women so thank you governor thank you for what you've done for us today thank you okay kaylee tuck thank you governor and thank you all for having me here today i can say a lot about why i filed this legislation and the reasons for this legislation but i think the testimony here is powerful enough we can't expect our girls and women to compete for third and fourth place and work hard doing it so this legislation protects the safety the competitiveness the integrity and the fairness of women's sports so thank you so much governor for for your support thank you to speaker sprouse for his leadership and uh thank you to my good friend and mentor chair latvala for for his guidance on this as well so thank you all right good job and i'm going to i'm going to sign in one second but i i want to just a smaller issue a part of this as many of you know when these legislators are doing things it's like making sausage there's different things that happen and so as part of this bill for whatever reason there was a provision there that was delaying something that we did previously in my administration with the legislature respecting college athletes ability to uh use their name image and likeness and be able to be compensated if people are doing that uh the bill that i'll sign today actually extends the date of effect from july 1st of this year till july 1st of next year however there was fixed there's another bill that i will then subsequently sign which will take precedence over that provision of this bill and so rest assured july 1st 2021 just as planned the name image and likeness the college athletes will be able to be compensated if people are using their name image and likeness and i know that we actually are coaches at throughout florida use that to recruit different athletes to be able to come to our state universities and we think that we're proud of florida leading the way on that yet again and we'll continue to do it so if you read this bill you will see that the one-year delay but just understand that one-year delay is is rectified already it will be rectified once i sign the other legislation that will happen so everyone can proceed accordingly as july 1st the date where our name image and likeness bill takes effect we're very proud of that as well all right let's go madison come here what's the name first school [Music] ta-da what about um oh [Applause] anybody we'll start back here jim go ahead so i think the um i think one we just i met him at the football game we have a good relationship i mean i don't think there was anything you know more to it than that they had a venue to offer so we did it but i think you know a lot of our schools throughout florida have done an excellent job in providing opportunities for people uh particularly for for women athletes and i think if you look across the board we do about as good as anybody and we're very proud of that okay um first of all the it's it's not a message to anything other than saying we're going to protect fairness in women's sports we believe that um it's important to have integrity in the competition and we think it's important that they're able to compete on a level playing field and uh you know you've seen what's happened when you don't have that yes ma'am so it's something that uh depending on the issue dep has the oversight over and i know we just saw um i guess an incident with over the over the weekend you know very very troubling uh we obviously want to have safety first uh so they are absolutely looking into that there's things that i can do from administrative perspective you know i'm obviously willing to uh to do that so okay thanks everybody great to be here

Channel: Forbes Breaking News

Views: 422,602

Keywords: ron desantis, transgender, florida

Id: eq3f8VgwuBk

Length: 20min 7sec (1207 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/HBPilot]

...because they are biologically male, which gives them an advantage over biological females. Say what you want about gender- biology is NOT a social construct.

[u/steunmchanson]

The Olympics have allowed trans athletes to compete in the gender with which they identify since 2004. Could anyone who thinks being trans gives an unfair advantage explain why there hasn't been an overrepresentation of trans athletes among Olympic medalists since then?

[u/Credible_Cognition]

Good. 2024 please.

[u/BennetHB]

Eh it makes sense but seems like a largely performative measure to excite the base. There's simply isn't that big of a problem to begin with. There's not that many transexuals in public secondary schools or colleges, let alone ones seeking to compete in sports.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/greengengar]

It's been shown that with hormone therapies, transwomen aren't inherently stronger than women. There needs to be more research, but transwomen are not men. It's gross to sign such a thing into law on the first day of gay pride month. Afaik, sports organizations have been successfully self regulating on trans athletes for 10 years or so.

[u/ThymeCypher]

Let’s ignore that he also signed into law that players can profit off their names and identities.