ATLANTA — Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones released a statement Tuesday announcing his support for recent recommendations to bar biological men from participating in women’s sports and athletic competitions.
The announcement follows the final recommendations of a Georgia Senate committee focused on transgender rights and participation in women’s sports in the state.
As Channel 2 Action News has previously reported, Georgia legislators passed a law in 2022 that empowered the Georgia High School Association to regulate transgender students’ participation in school sports, preventing them from competing in competitions based on their gender identity, rather than biological sex.
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Now, Jones says he fully agrees with the Senate committee’s recommendations and thanked its members for their work.
“I want to thank Chairman Greg Dolezal for his leadership on this important committee and I appreciate all of the hard work from the entire membership. The Senate continues to lead on efforts to protect women’s sports and all of the work they put into competing and becoming elite athletes. Ensuring that in the future, females participating in Georgia sports are protected at any level will be a priority during the 2025 session,” Jones said in a statement.
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The Senate committee’s recommendations, if implemented, could have effects reaching into school sports, sponsored events, locker rooms, state funding for schools and scholarships for students.
The recommendations by the committee included the following priorities:
- Repeal the delegation of authority by the General Assembly to high school athletic associations to regulate participation in women’s sports
- Provide protections in statute for the protection of women’s sports in Georgia at the secondary and collegiate levels for public high schools, colleges, and universities and private institutions that compete with and against public schools in sports. This should include rules providing that, based on the athlete’s biological sex at birth, men cannot compete in sports designated for women.
- Require schools that host or sponsor sporting events to provide separate changing and dressing facilities for male and female athletes based on their biological sex at birth.
- Provide enforcement options for rules regarding women’s sports participation and separate changing and dressing facilities, including grievance proceedings and civil remedies for aggrieved participants and the authority to withhold state funding from schools who fail or refuse to abide by these rules.
- Adopt other rules, as necessary, to ensure that the regulation of sports is based on promoting and preserving competitive fairness and protecting student safety and that female student athletes have fair opportunities to demonstrate their strength, skills, and athletic abilities and to obtain recognition, accolades, college scholarships, and the numerous other long-term benefits that result from participating and competing in sports.
The 2025 legislative session begins Jan. 13, 2025 and will continue through early April.
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