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When Wyoming legislators in 2022 passed a law banning trans girls from competing in middle and high school girls’ sports, the Cowboy State, by its governor’s own estimate, had a grand total of four transgender student athletes competing within its boundaries.
Still, in this year’s legislative session, which wrapped up on Friday, trans athletes were again a focus of lawmakers. They introduced bills to extend the ban on trans women in athletics to intercollegiate sports and ban universities from competing against teams with trans women.
Lawmakers also proposed legislation requiring public facilities from restrooms to sleeping quarters to correspond with assigned sex at birth, restrooms in public schools to have exclusive use designations by assigned sex at birth, prohibiting the state from requiring the use of preferred pronouns, and establishing legal definitions for “biological sex”, “man” and “woman”.
Five of the seven bills made it through the legislature. The volume of proposals spotlights the new conservative vision of the role of government emerging in the state, as well as the Republican divisions on the issue.
Debate on trans-focused bills isn’t new to this legislative session. In 2022, Mark Gordon, Wyoming’s governor, described the state’s trans sports bill as “draconian” but still let it pass into law. Last year, 10 bills were introduced on the topic, and the legislature enacted a ban on gender affirming care for minors.
Wyoming politicians pushed controversy over the inclusion of a trans woman in a Wyoming sorority in 2022, and in 2024 over the University of Wyoming’s scheduled volleyball game against San Jose State University, whose team has a trans woman. Wyoming ultimately forfeited the game.
But the intense focus on the issue comes as Wyoming, never exactly a liberal state, has slid further to the right in recent years, a trend evidenced by an escalation of social issue bills that wouldn’t be out of place in Washington DC or other red-state legislatures.
For Santi Murillo, the first trans athlete at the University of Wyoming, the influx of bills has been dehumanizing.
“I consider myself to be a good person who contributes back to my community. But because I’m trans, I’m being attacked,” Murillo, who’s also the communications director for LGBTQ nonprofit Wyoming Equality, said. “That’s what a lot of that fear comes from, is being labeled as Santi the trans person, not Santi the cheer coach, not Santi my neighbor.”
Several Republican lawmakers who’ve introduced or sponsored trans bills this year said their proposals were aimed at protecting women and girls. “To protect safe spaces and to create level playing fields for women, biological women, that’s the sole intent of these types of bills,” said Republican representative Rachel Rodriguez-Williams, the chair of the state’s newly empowered Freedom Caucus and the primary sponsor of “Biological Males in Women’s Sports”.
It’s a topic legislators say they have found high on the minds of their constituents. “I have a very conservative rural district, and they just want to see these things addressed and some policies put out,” said Martha Lawley, a Republican representative who sponsored two related bills this session. She said that she heard more about the topic than any other from her constituents in the past year.
That concern is new, said Murillo, now 27. Murillo said she didn’t see this level of fear in the Wyoming she grew up in. She transitioned while a cheerleader at the University of Wyoming, which put her squarely in the public eye.
“I had a really positive transition experience for the most part. Especially doing so very publicly,” Murillo said. “UW games are huge, especially football games. There’s no hiding there.”
Murillo views the current debate as driven by politicians, not people.
So does Sara Burlingame, the director at Wyoming Equality. She believes that some see the spotlight on trans issues as an effective wedge issue to both motivate hardline voters to the polls, and split conservatives, much like efforts to ban gay marriage used to.
“Far-right Republicans recognized that they used to be able to fundraise and campaign off of gay panic,” Burlingame said. “They’re looking at what hits that sweet spot of lighting up people’s amygdala and getting them all fired up. And they feel like, hey, if someone you know was carrying this message, I would go and vote for them. I would drive myself to the polls.”
The focus on trans issues detracts from conversations about other major challenges ahead in the state, Burlingame said, like declining revenues in the gas and oil market that are leaving a gap in public funding. “I think they don’t have a solution for that,” Burlingame said of some Republican legislators. “So their solution is to attack trans kids.”
Burlingame sees the hyper-focus on gender as a departure from decades of Wyoming politics that erred toward libertarianism and small government, a departure that sped up this year as Wyoming’s Freedom Caucus became the first chapter of the nationally-based Freedom Caucus to take control of a state house.
“In the past, we had old, white, rancher Republican men who had no fondness for different gender identities or sexual orientation,” she said. “But they had a very specific belief in the role of government, and they wouldn’t vote to take anybody’s rights away because they just didn’t believe that was the role of government.”
Senator Cale Case is one of those Republicans outspoken in his opposition to the trans bills. Case, in the legislature since 1993, questions what problem they aim to solve, and said their sponsors are driven by fear.
“They don’t like to hear the word tolerance. They talk about freedom, and they have lots of bills with freedom in the title, but their bills restrict freedoms,” Case said.
Within supporters of the bills, there are divisions, too.
Jayme Lien, the representative who brought the What is a Woman Act, said she has not spoken with LGBTQ Wyomingites about the bill. Lien pointed towards testimony from the national group Gays Against Groomers, designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a far-right extremist group of self-identified LGBTQ+ people engaged in anti-trans organizing, in support of her legislation and argued that the safety concerns of LGBTQ residents were misplaced.
“I just want them to know that this is to protect them as well. And I think in the long run, once it’s implemented into law, they will see that this also protects them and their culture and community,” Lien argued.
Republican senator Wendy Schuler brought the state’s 2022 bill limiting trans girls’ access to certain sports team, and she introduced “Fairness in Sports – Intercollegiate Athletics” in this year’s legislative session.
Schuler, who competed in five varsity athletics at the University of Wyoming said that she “doesn’t know what the answer is” for transgender athletes in Wyoming, but that her priority is “making sure our biological girls were all taken care of in terms of their access to athletics.”
“I understand the trans athletes here, she said. “I totally get where they’re coming from, because I had to sit on the sidelines while I was playing baseball with my brothers.”
Schuler said that she consulted with teenagers and some transgender Wyomingites in writing her bills, which lead to exemptions for non-contact sports.
While standing firm behind sports bills, Schuler derided the bills focused on bathroom usage and the legal definitions as an ineffective use of legislative time, and indicative of national theatrics meeting Wyoming politics.
“In terms of the bathroom stuff, and you know what is a woman and some of these other bills that have come through the pipe this year, I just think we had lots more important things we should have been focusing on,” Schuler said. “But that’s what the social issues of the day seem to be.”
In what she owned as a “contradiction”, Schuler voted yes on all three bills that came before her.
Schuler said she “thinks the world” of Murillo, and Murillo and Burlingame also spoke kindly of Schuler.
For Murillo, having friendships with people she views as infringing on her rights is complicated, but is a sort of necessity when advocating for LGBTQ+ rights in deep-red states.
“It’s a totally different kind of ball game,” Murillo said. “Doing this work in a red state, you have to be willing to have those conversations. You have to be willing to set aside those things, find that common ground.”
If current political trends continue, Burlingame and Murillo fear that there will be less legislators willing to work out compromises. Wyoming’s 2024 summer primary saw complete Republican upheaval and a glut of mailers, often accusing politicians of a “radical gender agenda”. Senator Case said that there’s pressure on elected officials in Wyoming to toe the line, or else.
“Some of my colleagues who still have a longer career ahead of them, and also have aspirations, are in agony on every one of these votes. These are good people, friends of mine,” Case said. “I’m not doing that. I’m gonna get pounded for this. It might cost an election. But honestly, I don’t think it’s right and I feel so much better inside.”
Murillo said in light of rhetoric surrounding the flood of legislation, she no longer considers Wyoming a safe place to be transgender.
“I definitely used to feel safe here, but no, not any more. I feel like the air has just shifted here,” Murillo said.
