Gov. Josh Shapiro, making his first public statement about a bill in the Legislature that would prevent transgender girls and women from playing on publicly funded sports teams, said the legislation is the work of extremist politicians.
“What we do not need in Pennsylvania are politicians — extremist politicians like Donald Trump, Doug Mastriano, and these others — trying to legislate a student’s participation and legislate the restriction on freedom,” Shapiro said Tuesday, “the way they’ve tried to do on many other things, like on abortion rights or marriage equality.”
President Trump signed an executive order in February to keep all trans people out of athletics called “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” while state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who lost to Shapiro in the 2022 gubernatorial race, co-sponsored the athletic ban and is the prime sponsor of a bill that would bar Pennsylvania’s government from recognizing trans individuals in official records.
The state’s Republican-led Senate passed the so-called Save Women’s Sports Act, Senate Bill 9, with unanimous GOP support and five Democratic votes.
The bill is now in the House, where the Democratic majority is preventing the bill from being called up for a vote.
State Rep. Martina White, R-Philadelphia, who leads the Republican caucus in the Pennsylvania House, supports SB 9 and pushed back on Shapiro’s criticism.
“ I think the only thing that is extreme about the entire commentary is the governor’s position on the issue, which is to allow biological men in women’s locker rooms and taking women’s athletics achievements from them,” White said.
White’s use of the phrase “biological men,” and Trump’s reference to transgender women as men, is a rhetorical and political strategy often used by opponents of transgender rights to downplay the significance of gender and how it differs from sex.
Malinda Harnish Clatterbuck, a Lancaster County resident and advocate for trans youth, said politicians who use language to deny trans identity are dehumanizing children rather than protecting them.
“ Part of the reason this bill is even coming up is because so many people don’t understand trans, and passing judgment on people you don’t understand is an ignorant approach,” Clatterbuck said. “I’m utterly, not just disappointed, but disgusted by the behavior of these adults who are willing to treat children that way.”Her own child, Ashton Myles Clatterbuck, died by suicide in February 2024 at 22 years old. His obituary describes him as living “a fiercely compassionate life,” and one full of political activism.
Fairness in sports versus discrimination
Shapiro, despite using “extremist” to describe lawmakers who support the bill, declined to say Tuesday whether he would veto SB 9 if it comes to his desk.
“ It’s a hypothetical. The House isn’t moving that bill, and I haven’t reviewed it specifically,” Shapiro said.
While campaigning for governor in 2022, Shapiro said he would veto any bill that limited abortion access or would weaken the ability of workers to unionize. Neither hypothetical bill has made it to his desk.
Though Clatterbuck supports Shapiro and said she thinks he is a good advocate for trans people, she said she is disappointed he is not taking a bold public stance on SB 9. She said his approach lets Republicans control the narrative, to let them describe the bill as being about fairness rather than discrimination.
A majority of Pennsylvanians support preventing transgender athletes from participating in girls’ sports, according to polling from Franklin & Marshall College. That poll, from 2022, put the number at 64% support. A national poll from The New York Times and Ipsos, conducted in January, put support at 79%, though the question was phrased differently between the opinion surveys.
Berwood Yost, who runs F&M’s opinion research center, said voters appear to understand the ban on transgender athletes’ sports participation as an issue of fairness. The policy earns support across the political spectrum and across demographics.
But voters also reject discrimination, including against transgender people. Yost points to another question in the 2022 poll in which a majority of voters opposed a measure to ban classroom instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation.
In his statements to WITF, Shapiro repeatedly tried to tie the sports ban to unfavorable Republican policies, like limiting access to abortion or opposing marriage equality. F&M polling shows majorities also support access to abortion and same sex marriage.
Rather than state his opposition to the bill, Shapiro on Tuesday adopted a line of argument that was used by Senate Democrats in debate before SB 9 was passed in May: That the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association is best able to regulate athletic participation on a case-by-case basis.
In the last five years, the PIAA has had three students’ eligibility questioned on the grounds of their gender identity, Shapiro said. That’s out of about 350,000 kids in school athletics each year.
“ I’m proud of the fact that in each instance, some of which predated my time in office, the PIAA has worked in a humane way with the school, with the student athlete, to come up with a resolution,” Shapiro said.
As a practical policy matter, the PIAA has already changed its rules to limit participation from transgender athletes after Trump’s executive order. Regardless of Senate Bill 9, transgender athletes are on uneven ground in Pennsylvania.
No place for trans athletes
The governor has said publicly several times that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are loved and his administration will defend their rights, including at Lancaster Pride in June.
On July 14, Shapiro held a private meeting with transgender youth and their families. They told stories of being bullied in school and of losing access to gender-affirming medical care, according to Shapiro’s account, which was confirmed by Clatterbuck and two teens who were in attendance.
“My heart breaks for these kids and they deserve better,” Shapiro said.
Specifically addressing participation in sports, Shapiro said, “I look at this as a governor. I look at this as a father who coached my kids in various sports.”
He added, “ I also think these young people shouldn’t get a special advantage on the field,” referring to the belief that transgender girls are more athletic than girls whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth.
Actually determining competitiveness is more complex. Senate Bill 9 would ban transgender girls of all ages from playing on girls’ teams, even for elementary school sports where children are unlikely to have started to experience significant changes from puberty.
Athletics associations like the National Collegiate Athletic Association also previously had policies, before Trump’s executive order, governing the amount of time trans women needed to be on hormone replacement therapy before participating in women’s competitions. Those policies reflected studies showing that trans women, who may have completed puberty as a male and benefited from increased muscle density due to higher levels of testosterone, lose that advantage over time with hormone therapy.
Lucas Shumaker, a 22-year-old college student who grew up in Lancaster, said the policy also ignores trans men’s participation in sports. He swam competitively on a girls’ team until he was 18. He didn’t come out to his team until later in part, he said, so he could keep swimming.
Since then, Shumaker has started hormone replacement therapy in his transition to being more male-presenting.
“I’ve been on testosterone for three years. I have increased muscle mass,” Shumaker said. “Me competing with women on a women’s team is also unfair, in their words.”
In effect, policies like Senate Bill 9, would leave no place for transgender athletes, not even on teams of the sex the athletes were assigned at birth.
Clatterbuck supports Shapiro and appreciates what he’s said and done for transgender Pennsylvanians. But she said she was disappointed with how Shapiro framed the issue of trans people participating in sports.
“ I would’ve rather heard him say something like, ‘This false narrative that trans people are transitioning just to have an advantage on the field is bullshit,’” Harnish Clatterbuck said.
Politically, an uphill battle
House Republicans this month attempted to use an uncommon legislative maneuver called a discharge resolution to force a vote on SB 9.
Rather than allowing a vote on the bill, House Democrats referred it to another committee, where it will sit without action for at least another 15 legislative days when Republicans will again be able to try to force another vote.
Democrats, who control the House and therefore which bills come up for a vote, have enough procedural tricks up their sleeves to bar any vote on the bill. A spokesperson for Speaker of the House Joanna McClinton provided basic information on discharge resolutions for this story, but did not respond to detailed questions about procedure or the party’s politics of hiding from the bill.
Though she said she understands the Democrats’ strategy, Clatterbuck said she is frustrated with the party’s approach.
“ I don’t quite understand people’s fear and kowtowing to the GOP,” she said. “The GOP has been emboldened to be more than aggressive in their discrimination because Dems have backed off and stepped down and refused to boldly stand up and speak the truth in a confident way.”
The Pennsylvania Youth Caucus, a coalition of LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, said it appreciated House Democrats’ approach and is confident Shapiro will veto “any attack against LGBTQ+ Pennsylvanians.”
It is common legislative practice to bury a bill so that it never receives a vote.
In 2024, Senate Democratic leader Jay Costa of Allegheny County filed three discharge resolutions for bills passed by the House that Senate Republicans had not taken up. One of those bills was the Fairness Act, written to prevent discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in areas of housing, education, or access to public accommodations. Costa’s attempt to get the bills to the Senate floor for a vote failed.
Democrats have reintroduced anti-discrimination bills protecting LGBTQ+ people in the House and Senate, though neither has been brought up for debate in committee — a usual first step before a bill is referred for a vote by the full House.
Read more from our partners at WITF.