The Alaska Board of Education announced late Friday afternoon that it will hold a special meeting this Thursday to consider approval of its controversial regulations that would ban trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams.
The board held a public hearing on the issue in late July, taking hours of public testimony that opposed the ban, and ultimately decided to delay action. Ostensibly, members said they wanted more time to consider the issues at hand. Still, most members are already on the record for supporting singling out trans girls in high school sports through a resolution passed earlier this year.
The meeting is scheduled for 1 p.m. Thursday, the board is not scheduled to take any further public testimony.
At the July hearing, several members accused the public opposed to the ban of misunderstanding the issue or reading from form letters. Board member Jeff Erickson commented that delaying it would at least give the public the impression that they were giving it fair consideration.
“I’d be in favor of a special meeting and allowing us to show the public and show our constituents that we’re not just doing this to quickly rush through it,” he said, “but we want to take a long look at all of the concerns raised.”
All members of the Board of Education were appointed by far-right Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who has leaned into conservative panic over trans people in his second term. While efforts to ban trans kids from sports have failed to gain traction in the Alaska Legislature, where many members of both parties have recognized that such a ban would create more harm than good, Dunleavy and other far-right legislators have pushed for other areas to enact the ban.
In a letter to the Board of Education, Dunleavy reiterated his support for the ban and suggested changing the language in the proposed regulation from “females that were assigned female at birth” to “biological females.” Earlier this month, Dunleavy also amplified on social media the growing idea in conservative circles that gender-affirming care is dangerous “pseudoscience”—essentially that trans people and gender dysmorphia don’t exist but are instead the product of a conspiracy by leftist doctors.
Advocates for trans kids argue that the prevalence of trans kids in Alaska sports is small and that the claimed problems of fairness and safety have never been a problem. As is the case with bans around the nation, supporters of the ban have been unable to point to real-world examples of their fears.
There’s also the matter of the legal problems with the ban. Not only do several legislators question whether the Board of Education has the power to enact such a policy through regulation, but they have warned that it likely violates the Alaska Constitution’s privacy clause by forcing kids to disclose their personal medical information to schools and equal protections because it targets explicitly trans girls.
And that’s not just guesswork.
Earlier this month, a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit—whose jurisdiction includes Alaska—issued a ruling that continues to block Idaho’s ban on trans girls participating in girls’ sports, which is likely a preview of how the Alaska Board of Education’s ban would be handled. While not the final word, the ruling raises familiar privacy and equal protection issues. It also notes that the state couldn’t even find an example of someone being harmed in any way—whether in injury or by missed opportunity—by a trans athlete’s participation.
“Because the Act subjects only women and girls who wish to participate in public school athletic competitions to an intrusive sex verification process and categorically bans transgender girls and women at all levels from competing,” the court said, “and because the State of Idaho failed to adduce any evidence demonstrating that the Act is substantially related to its asserted interests in sex equality and opportunity for women athletes, we affirm the district court’s grant of preliminary injunctive relief.”
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
