The ACLU, ACLU of Minnesota and pro bono partner Lockridge Grindal Nauen PLLP, filed an amicus brief with the Minnesota Supreme Court on August 30, 2024, in the case Cooper v. USA Power Lifting.
JayCee Cooper sought to compete in powerlifting competitions in the women’s division. However, she was excluded from eligibility by USAPL because she is a trans woman. The ACLU-MN argues that this violates the Minnesota Human Rights Act (MHRA) and conflicts with federal courts’ consistent recognition that discriminating against trans women and girls is a form of sex discrimination.
In 1993, Minnesota became the first state to expressly protect trans individuals from discrimination. In 2023, the state legislature reaffirmed its commitment to protecting trans individuals from discrimination, explicitly defining gender identity in the MHRA, to mean “a person’s inherent sense of being a man, woman, both, or neither.”
“Transgender women are women,” said ACLU-MN Staff Attorney Alicia Granse. “The Minnesota Human Rights Act protects the rights of all women to participate equally in our state. Calling a transgender woman a “biological male” in order to exclude her from women’s sports is discrimination and violates the text and spirit of the law. We urge the Court to reject this reasoning and to protect transgender people from unequal treatment in our state.”
“Transgender athletes like JayCee Cooper are irreparably harmed by policies that ban them from participating in sports as who they are,” said ACLU Staff Attorney Sruti Swaminathan. “Equal participation in athletics for transgender people does not detract from participation opportunities for cisgender female athletes. To the contrary, preventing the exclusion of transgender women and girls from women’s and girls’ sports actualizes the promise of sex equality, and we will never stop fighting until all transgender individuals are given the equal playing field they deserve.”