The 2023 Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities held a public hearing in the Capitol building Wednesday morning to give the public the opportunity to testify their opinions on the proposed Assembly Bill 378, intended to restrict transgender college athletes from sports teams based on their sex at birth.

Two other Republican-authored bills seeking to separate K-12 sports teams by biological sex and ban gender-affirming care were also discussed in public hearings Monday. All three hearings saw a large turnout from the community.

The proposed legislation in AB 378 would mandate that every University of Wisconsin System institution and technical college that runs or supports intercollegiate, intramural or club athletic teams, must classify these teams into one of three categories according to the sex of the participating students.

The bill defines “sex” as the “sex determined by a physician at birth.” This would prohibit a person who falls under this legislation’s definition of male from participating in an athletic team designated for females or women. 

At the hearing, several members of the Madison community and others from around the country testified for or against the legislation. 

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Paula Scanlan, the first to testify, is a prominent spokeswoman for the Independent Women’s Forum, and is the former teammate of Lia Thomas of the University of Pennsylvania’s Women’s Swim Team, the first openly transgender athlete to win the NCAA Division 1 National Championship in the Women’s 500m freestyle event.

In her testimony, Scanlan referred to an anecdotal story of her teammates’ discomfort in sharing a locker room with Thomas.

Scanlan told the committee that she noticed one of the women in the group repeatedly opting to change in the single stall bathroom rather than in the locker room with Thomas. Scanlan said it was this event that compelled her to advocate against Thomas’s place on the team, because she felt the rest of the group’s feelings towards her participation were being invalidated.

Former NCAA Division 1 wrestling coach Michael Burch gave a countering testimony in opposition to the proposed bill. Burch coached wrestling for 25 years at Big 10, Pacific-12 and Ivy League schools.

Burch called into question the bill’s claimed intention of “protecting women in sports”. Throughout the course of both his academic and coaching career, the ideological ancestry of protecting women in sports has been “pretty ugly,” Burch said.

In his testimony, Burch told the committee that he is wary of bills that aim to protect women’s rights, noting that these legislations are often conceived by male legislators.

“We’ve had numerous kinds of protections that kept women from running marathons, or from participating in wrestling, and in a variety of Olympic sports,” Burch said. “So, just the idea of a bill that is designed to protect women in sports doesn’t have a good history.”

Governor Tony Evers has promised to veto Assembly Bill 378, along with the two other propositions, Assembly Bill 377 and Assembly Bill 465.