The Georgia House passed the “Riley Gaines Act” on Thursday, which would bar transgender-identifying male athletes from competing against women and girls.
The bill is named after Gaines, a women’s sports advocate and host of the Gaines for Girls podcast on OutKick. Gaines has been a champion of protecting women’s sports ever since she tied with trans-identifying male athlete Lia Thomas in the women’s 200-meter freestyle event at the NCAA championships in 2022.
Georgia lawmakers voted 102-54 on the legislation, also called House Bill 267, Fox News reported.
Every single no vote came from Democrats, and zero Republicans opposed the bill. Three Democrats voted yea, and of the ten lawmakers who did not vote, nine were Democrats, according to the report.
The measure is now set to move to the Senate, which has passed its own version of the bill.
“Female athletes deserve fair competition and that means the chance to maintain the women’s divisions distinct from men’s categories,” said the bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Josh Bonner of Fayetteville.
Georgia’s high school athletic association bans students from participating in sports based on the invented concept of “gender identity,” the idea that one can identify or become a different sex than they were born. Twenty-five other states have similar laws restricting athletes from participating on teams that do not align with biological reality, according to the Fox News report.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order on February 5 barring males from playing on female sports teams as a condition of federal funding for education programs.
Several states have openly rejected this order, including California, Minnesota, and Maine. As a result, the Department of Education has launched Title IX investigations. Trump explicitly threatened Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) with a funding cut after a transgender-identifying male was allowed to compete in a high school girls’ pole vault competition and took first place.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
