News - April 10, 2025 - by Ray Hagar

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State Sen. Melanie Scheible, D-Las Vegas and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the Nevada Legislature, castigated the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association this week for their recent decision to ban transgender athletes from girls' high school sports.

"I'm offended by that decision," Scheible told host Sam Shad on Nevada Newsmakers.

"I'm appalled by the decision because it targets this very small group of student-athletes who identify as transgender," Scheible said. "And those athletes are not the danger in our school system. They are not the ones who are committing bad acts.

"They are literally children who are going through an incredibly difficult time in their young years, trying to identify who they are, trying to understand where they fit in the world, and who have maybe been so lucky as to find a place on their school's basketball team, or on the tennis team, or on the track team," Scheible said.

"And now we're telling them, "No, this safe place that you have is no longer safe for you'," she continued.

The ban reverses an NIAA policy established in 2016 that allowed athletic participation based on gender identity, with approval from the school.

"Due to sex-linked differences in physical development and athletic performance, only sex, and not gender identity or expression, can be considered a relevant characteristic for eligibility on a girls' or women's team," the NIAA wrote in a statement of its new transgender policy.

To some, the NIAA's new policy is a solution looking for a problem since it appears there are few transgender athletes competing in Nevada schools.

NIAA officials recently said that both the NIAA and Nevada school districts do not track the number of transgender athletes playing high school sports in the state.

A lawyer for the NIAA, Paul Anderson, reportedly said the NIAA has "never had a Level Two appeal in regards to a transgender student" in the nine years when the previous policy was in place.

"You have adults who sit on the NIAA board who are sowing division between children who just want to play soccer together, who just want play on a basketball team," Scheible said.

At the collegiate level, fewer than 10 transgender athletes now compete in NCAA sports out of a total of about 500,000 athletes, according to the NCAA.

"It is an incredibly tiny number overall," Scheible said about the number of transgender athletes in Nevada prep sports. "You know, different researchers have different percentages on the number of people in America who are transgender. It's certainly less than 10 percent of the population.

"It's even smaller number when you start talking about children and an even smaller number when you start talking about children who participate in sports. So we're talking about a handful of athletes across the entire state of Nevada," Scheible said.

The Trump factor

The NIAA's decision came after President Trump issued an executive order seeking to ban transgender athletes in women’s sports and threatening to revoke federal funds from any entities that violate it.

The NCAA has gotten in line with Trump's demand, too, announcing shortly after the President's proclamation that only women assigned female at birth will be allowed to compete under its umbrella.

Scheible was asked if the NIAA ban could eventually be subject to a court challenge, however, she did not address the question.

Andre Wade, state director of Silver State Equality, Nevada’s LGBTQ civil rights organization, called the NIAA's new policy "unconstitutional" and warned parents of female high school athletes that their daughters could be subject to added "invasive" scrutiny about their gender.

"All parents should be deeply concerned about the NIAA’s new policy," Wade said in a Nevada Sports Net story. "The policy imposes discriminatory scrutiny on female athletes, subjecting them to invasive physical exams by a physician — standards not applied to their male counterparts. "

Nine of the 12 NIAA board members voted for the ban, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal.

"I think there is a very small group of people who are very obsessed with children's genitals, who care about where transgender kids play sports," Scheible said. "I do not think 100 percent of the American people are worrying about whether their kid's soccer team has one child on it who is transgender, or whether the opposing team has one child on it who is transgender," Scheible said.

The push to ban transgender athletes is part of a movement to cast them as villains, Scheible said.

"There is a very small group of people who have become fixated on the villainization of this one small group of transgender athletes," Scheible said. "Because it's easy to pick on them and because it provides another place for them to focus their energy on blaming somebody else for whatever problems they have going on in their lives."

Criticism of Lt. Gov. Anthony

Scheible was also critical of Lt. Gov. Stavros Anthony for pushing the ban on transgender athletes because it is not a defined duty of his office.

Scheible is also concerned that Anthony is using state resources of his office, state employees and their time for his "Lieutenant Governor's Task Force to Protect Women's Sports."

"I agree that this was completely outside of the lieutenant governor's job description," Scheible said. "I was alarmed to hear during one of the finance committee meetings that he's been utilizing state resources to run the task force."

Scheible is the second state Democratic lawmaker to speak out on Nevada Newsmakers against Lt. Gov. Anthony and his use of state resources for his "Task Force to Protect Women's Sports."

Assemblyperson Selena Torres-Fossett, D-Las Vegas, said Anthony should be focused on official duties of his office, like small-business advocacy, and not on an issue to further his political career.

Said Scheible: "Politicians are allowed to get involved in whatever political organizations or activities they want to get involved in -- outside of their time in the government building.

"But I find it extremely disturbing that his office has been coordinating those (task force) meetings and has been helping his task force to develop their policies or their bills or whatever it is that they're doing.

"When, again, the whole purpose is to villainize a small group of literal children who are just trying to play sports," Scheible said.

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