On Tuesday, Indiana Gov. Mike Braun (R) signed legislation banning trans women from playing on college women’s sports teams.

The law “prohibits a male, based on the student’s biological sex at birth in accordance with the student’s genetics and reproductive biology, from participating on an athletic team or sport designated as being a female, women’s, or girls’ athletic team or sport.” It also requires state schools and some private schools to “establish grievance procedures for a violation of these provisions.”

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The legislation extends the state’s anti-trans sports policies that already exist for K-12 athletes. In 2022, the Indiana legislature voted to override then-Gov. Eric Holcomb’s (R) veto of an anti-trans sports bill, which banned transgender girls and women from participating in school sports. Holcomb claimed it was unconstitutional and addressed a nonexistent issue in the state.

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In March, Braun also signed two anti-trans executive orders, one banning trans women from women’s sports at the collegiate level and the other declaring there are only two genders: male and female.

“Women’s sports create opportunities for young women to earn scholarships and develop leadership skills,” he said in a statement at the time. “Hoosiers overwhelmingly don’t want those opportunities destroyed by allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports, and today’s executive order will make sure of that.” 

In a statement defending his executive order legally erasing trans and nonbinary identities, he touted the “scientific fact of biological sex” and claimed “replacing” that with “the always-changing, self-reported idea of ‘gender identity’ has real consequences.”

“Indiana will not go along with this radical new idea of what gender means,” he said, “and we will not allow tax dollars to be used to promote this ideology — instead, we’re going to focus on providing Freedom and Opportunity for all Hoosiers.”

The press release announcing the orders stated, “Indiana will not go along with the extreme gender ideology that created the problem in women’s sports in the first place.”

In reality, there is no problem in women’s sports, as there is only a record of a handful of out transgender college and K-12 students even participating.

NCAA President Charlie Baker told a Senate committee in December that he is aware of fewer than 10 transgender athletes among more than 500,000 student-athletes who compete in NCAA championship sports.

And reporting by the Associated Press in 2021 revealed that dozens of lawmakers who sponsored legislation to restrict trans athletes’ participation in school sports couldn’t cite a single example in their own state where trans athletes had caused problems. 

Even more, a recent study found that trans women actually underperform when compared to cis athletes. The study confirms that transitioning presents various physical changes, such as a lower center of mass and fat distribution, decreased muscle mass and bone density, and lower blood oxygen levels.

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