Lt. Gov. Burt Jones voiced his support for five recommendations from the Senate Special Committee on the Protection of Women’s Sports and stressed that protecting females participating in Georgia will be a priority during the 2025 session.
“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,” said Jones. “Ensuring that in the future, females participating in Georgia sports are protected at any level will be a priority during the 2025 session.”
State Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, chaired the committee and stressed that the recommendations will improve “competitive fairness” in high school and college athletics.
The Senate committee held its final meeting of the off-session late last week and adopted recommendations that could become legislation in the 2025 session of the General Assembly. Lawmakers return to the Capitol January 13.
One of the recommendations calls for lawmakers to repeal the delegation of authority by the General Assembly to high school athletic associations to regulate participation in women’s sports. “This is an issue that should be decided by the people’s elected representatives,” the report says.
The other recommendations coming out of the committee are:
● 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.
