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West Virginia Republican Gov. Jim Justice at a news conference on Monday endorsed what's being billed as a “Women’s Bill of Rights,” introduced last week in the state House. The move makes him the latest Republican governor to engage in this increasingly popular Trojan Horse-style stunt.
Despite its name, this proposed "bill of rights" doesn’t guarantee to the women of West Virginia access to abortion care or their bodily autonomy — which they are being denied due to the state's anti-abortion laws. And it doesn’t guarantee institutional opportunities for women outside the home, which would be helpful as the GOP targets a key resource for women in workplaces and schools: diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
No, this “bill of rights” is just anti-LGBTQ propaganda designed to demonize trans women. The full name of West Virginia’s proposed “women’s bill of rights” doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as well: It’s “The West Virginia Act to Define Sex-Based Terms Used in State Law, Help Protect Single Sex Spaces, and Ensure the Accuracy of Public Data Collection.” And it fits a trend of similar proposals that have been pushed in other Republican-controlled states.
The bill attempts a reductive definition of a woman as a person whose "reproductive system ... at some point produces ova." But as The Associated Press noted last year, this strict definition marginalizes “people born with genitalia, reproductive organs, chromosomes and/or hormone levels that don’t fit typical definitions for male or female.”
The West Virginia bill, which mirrors policies enacted in Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska, ensures trans women aren’t able to use facilities or services designated for women. The law includes “athletics, living facilities, locker rooms, bathrooms, domestic violence shelters, and rape crisis centers” and requires government-run agencies, including schools under the state department of education, to abide by this simplistic definition of gender when recording data on members.
Watch video of Justice endorsing the bill below:
One of the people sitting at Justice’s side during his endorsement was Riley Gaines, the former college swimmer who’s made a right-wing media career out of whining about her fifth-place tie in 2022 with Lia Thomas, a trans woman who competed against her.
Gaines is an ambassador for a group called Independent Women’s Voice, an organization that has promoted the anti-trans “women’s bill of rights” in other states. As the Guardian reported last summer:
[T]he Women’s Bill of Rights is a weapon in a war against gender equity being waged by a conservative non-profit women’s group. Independent Women’s Voice, or IWV, lobbies against the equal rights amendment, criticizes public school curriculum and opposes government-funded parental leave. Recently, they have turned their resources to fighting transgender rights. And, according to documents shared with the Guardian by watchdog True North Research, IWV budgeted nearly $6m to promote anti-trans messaging in 10 swing states in advance of [the 2022] midterms.
These so-called women’s bills of rights are actually blunt weapons to attack trans women and are being used as a wedge issue to disguise conservative efforts to roll back women’s rights more broadly.