[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 45 (Thursday, March 9, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H1213-H1214]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       MAGA POLITICAL PRIORITIES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Wisconsin (Mr. Pocan) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POCAN. Madam Speaker, you have probably heard the Republican 
majority tell you they are laser focused on reducing costs for the 
average American by lowering inflation. You have likely heard about 
their alleged quest for a smaller, less-intrusive government. Yup, I 
have heard them, too.
  Well, this week in Congress clearly shows they didn't mean any of 
that. In fact, quite the opposite.
  Just yesterday, Republicans showed their real priorities--partisan 
ultra-MAGA political priorities--by considering a trans and intersex 
sports ban as their opening salvo in their efforts to undermine the 
rights of LGBTQ+ people.
  Here are the facts. Young people participate in sports to be part of 
a team, learn sportsmanship, and challenge themselves. It is about 
friendships and learning to work together as a team. The GOP sports ban 
seeks to strip trans girls of all ages of these opportunities.
  Look, there are real, pressing problems impacting women's and girls' 
sports, including sexual harassment and assault, lack of equal 
resources, and pay inequality. These are real issues that the GOP 
majority is ignoring.
  There are pressing problems facing kids of our Nation, including 
nearly 50,000 gun deaths a year, including more than 4,700 that involve 
kids; but not a peep from the Republicans in Congress about something 
that is actually killing children.
  Rather than addressing any of these issues, anti-equality politicians 
on the Committee on Education and the Workforce spent their first 
legislative markup this session targeting the few trans girls and women 
who participate in school sports.
  When it comes to protecting women's sports, we should look to leading 
women's sports and gender justice organizations like the Women's Sports 
Foundation and the National Women's Law

[[Page H1214]]

Center. Both organizations, as well as leading women athletes, support 
transgender inclusion in sports.
  Major athletic bodies such as the International Olympic Committee and 
NCAA have guidelines for the participation of transgender athletes, and 
these bodies reject the type of systematic exclusion of transgender 
people from sports that anti-LGBTQ+ politicians are pushing.
  This isn't about a real problem in this Nation. This is part of a 
larger coordinated attack against transgender people and the larger 
LGBTQ+ population. We have seen hundreds of anti-equality bills, many 
specifically targeting transgender people introduced in States across 
the country this year.
  Unfortunately, this is about building the personal brand of some 
extreme rightwing politicians, people who fundraise from and appeal to 
a small subset of their political base, rather than about a real 
problem in this country.
  These bullying politicians will endanger the lives of trans kids for 
their own political purposes, seemingly with the support of GOP 
leadership.
  I guess we shouldn't be surprised. Not one Republican in leadership 
called out the comments last week by a conservative speaker at the CPAC 
conference who called for the eradication of transgender people.
  This isn't about sports. This is about attacking trans and LGBTQ+ 
kids and the extreme MAGA politics of that issue, not the substance of 
just letting kids play. That is heartless and cruel.
  We will fight these attacks hard. We will call out this dangerous 
demagoguery, and we will make sure the public sees it for what it is--
raw, swampy politics, as usual, of the worst kind.
  There will be few pages assigned to future chapters of ``Profiles in 
Courage'' for the politicians that bully kids for their own gain. This 
week, that is exactly what we saw from the majority party in Congress, 
and we will expose this opportunistic bullying.

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