In the GOP response to President Biden’s State of the Union Address on February 7, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, newly elected Arkansas governor and former Press Secretary for Donald Trump, hit all the scaremongering and encoded racist and anti-LGBTQ notes the GOP has come to rely on. Touting her actions in banning history and books from the Arkansas school system which already ranks next to last in the nation, she also highlighted that she had banned the use of the term Latinx — the widely accepted and preferred gender neutral term for people of Hispanic ethnicity.
Sanders said that she was the “first woman to lead my state and he [Biden] is the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob who can’t even tell you what a woman is.”
Pundits noted that Sanders’s speech attacking the “woke left” might have been an opening to her running for president in 2024 or 2028.
Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis is already the undeclared GOP leader in the 2024 presidential race — in some polls right behind Donald Trump, who is the only declared candidate, and in others just ahead of him. DeSantis is determined to prove what a woman is with a new proposal to chart the menstrual cycles for female athletes. The result of his plan is two-fold: be sure that all female athletes menstruate, which trans athletes cannot, and be sure no female athletes are accessing abortions. The proposal has raised questions about whether the information could be used in cases against women and girls charged with violating Florida’s new 15-week abortion law.
DeSantis has led the nation in the GOP war on LGBTQ people. Why does DeSantis need a record of when every girl who plays sports is menstruating? A new draft physical evaluation form by the Florida High School Athletics Association (FHSAA), which makes the menstruation questions mandatory, looks like another attempt to roll back transgender rights in the state or target girls who get pregnant.
The FHSAA form wants the date of the girl’s first period, how long between periods, and how regular the cycle. Absent from these evaluations are two significant facts: some girls start menstruating later in adolescence and many girls and women stop menstruating when they are hyper-athletic. The average age of menstruation is 12 to 14, but can be as early as 10 and as late as 17.
Under the compulsory guidelines, when girls stop menstruating, schools can kick them off the team. They can be accused of an undisclosed pregnancy or an undisclosed trans identity. Some schools have checked the medical records of girls whose athleticism is superior to their teammates all the way back to kindergarten to “prove” their gender.
In a Twitter post on whether parents objected to this proposal, the tweet has gotten over a half million views and 3,000 responses with nearly all finding the questions intrusive and a presumed HIPAA violation.
The FHSAA’s proposal has yet to be finalized — the recommendation comes from an advisory committee. In a fact-check, the AP reports that “DeSantis’s education commissioner is a member of the association’s board of directors and the commissioner also appoints three others, but the association is a private nonprofit organization, not a state agency under the purview of the governor’s office.”
Florida already asks female high school athletes to provide information about their menstrual cycle on health forms that are required to participate in sports. That menstrual history is not currently mandatory.
FHSAA spokesperson Ryan Harrison confirmed in a statement that the new FHSAA recommendations had been developed by its sports medicine advisory committee. That committee approved the recommendations without comment two weeks ago. The proposal will now be considered by the association’s board of directors at its next meeting in Gainesville from Feb. 26-27.
The association is recognized as the state’s official governing body for interscholastic sports. Its board includes a representative for the office of state Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, who DeSantis appointed and who has previously made concerning comments about LGBTQ people. Diaz gets to choose three others to serve on the 16-member board.
DeSantis and Diaz’s offices didn’t respond to PGN requests for comment.
The FHSAA’s current Preparticipation Physical Evaluation Form, which must be completed by a student and their physician and kept on file at their school, asks female athletes five questions about their periods. Those questions remain optional. FHSAA asserts those questions have been on the forms for at least 20 years. The Preparticipation Physical Evaluation form used in Florida also includes questions about concussions, allergies, and blood pressure.
The proposed revisions to the form include four mandatory questions about menstruation, including if the student has ever had a period, the age they had their first period, the date of their most recent period and how many periods they’ve had in the past year.
National guidelines suggest menstrual history is an “essential discussion for female athletes” because period abnormalities could be a sign of “low energy availability, pregnancy, or other gynecologic or medical conditions.”
“Menstrual dysfunction is 2-3 times more common in athletes than nonathletes, and 10-15% of female athletes have amenorrhea (loss of menstrual cycle) or oligomenorrhea (a decrease in number of menstrual cycles per year),” the guidelines read. “Amenorrhea occurs more frequently in players of sports that emphasize leanness, such as running, gymnastics, cheerleading, dance, and figure skating.”
The FHSAA’s governing board is scheduled to hear recommendations from the agency’s Sports Medicine Advisory Committee on the future of the form. The board is comprised of athletic directors, coaches, school superintendents and school board members from around the state. The current makeup of the board is 14 men and two women.
After the proposed change was first reported by the Palm Beach Post, PRISM, a South Florida nonprofit organization that provides sexual health information to LGBTQ+ youth, has condemned the move as an effort to “stigmatize and demonize transgender people in sports.”