ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Her lawyers urged the state Supreme Court on Tuesday to allow a transgender athlete to compete in the women’s division of powerlifting competitions because the Minnesota Human Rights Act protects her from discrimination.
JayCee Cooper’s application to compete in the women’s division of USA Powerlifting’s competitions was denied in 2018 due to her strength advantages over other female competitors. In 2021, Cooper filed a lawsuit, and the trial court agreed with her.
However, in March, the Minnesota Court of Appeals returned the case to the trial court, stating that there were real questions of fact regarding whether Cooper’s transgender status was the rationale behind USA Powerlifting’s exclusion and if the organization had a valid commercial reason for doing so. Cooper then appealed to the highest court in the state.
Christy Hall, Cooper’s lawyer, urged the court to overturn the Court of Appeals ruling, claiming that USA Powerlifting’s rules discriminates against all transgender women, regardless of their unique physical talents.
According to Hall, it maintains that generalizations about people’s bodies can be utilized to discriminate against specific persons. Since firemen must be powerful and women aren’t as strong as men, you could use the same reasoning, for instance, to argue that women can’t be firefighters.
According to USA Powerlifting lawyer Ansis Viksnins, the legislation compels courts to determine whether a defendant had a discriminatory motive in addition to whether the behavior was discriminatory. In order to ascertain whether the sports organization had a valid justification for preventing Cooper from participating in its women’s division, he stated the Court of Appeals was correct to return the case to the trial court.
According to Viksnins Saoid, if Cooper’s arguments are successful, women’s sports would be severely impacted.
A hot topic during the autumn elections, transgender people’s participation in sports has been a controversial matter nationwide. RepublicanDuring his presidential campaign, Donald Trump made his opponents a major focus. Trump’s election was seen by the LGBT rights movement as one of its greatest defeats ever.
Transgender athletes are prohibited from participating in women’s and girls’ high school and collegiate sports in numerous Republican-led states. The subject of gender-affirming care for transgender adolescents, which has been outlawed by Tennessee and 25 other Republican-led states, will also be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday.
Former tennis champion Martina Navratilova was one of 83 female athletes who supported USA Powerlifting’s position in a collection of friend-of-the-court documents filed by organizations and athletes on both sides of the dispute, demonstrating the high level of interest in the Minnesota case. Gender Justice, a local LGBTQ+ rights group, is one among the groups supporting Cooper.
The Minnesota Human Rights Act was amended last year to explicitly cover gender identity and offers comprehensive safeguards against discrimination, including on the basis of sex as defined broadly.
Jess Braverman, legal director at Gender Justice, stated in a statement prior to the case’s oral arguments that the broad support for Cooper and trans inclusion in sports simply serves to highlight the fact that discrimination has no place in either society or sports. No one should be excluded from pursuing their goals and aspirations based just on their identity.
In their brief, USA Powerlifting made the case that transgender women powerlifters have a major edge in a sport that is fundamentally based on strength. Cooper could compete in an open division that the club established in 2021 to accommodate people of all gender identities, the company added.
“We have not only failed in our responsibility to provide fair competition for our women competitors, but we have thrown the door wide open to eliminating other category distinctions like age and weight if male-born powerlifters can compete against female-born athletes,” stated USA Powerlifting President Larry Maile in a statement.
The justices did not specify when they would render a decision; they took the case under advisement. The final ruling won’t establish a legally enforceable precedent for other states because the legal arguments were mostly focused on how the judges should interpret Minnesota law. However, judges in other places with comparable problems might decide to use the legal justification for it.
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