Josh Hawley and John Kennedy derail Senate hearing on sports betting with anti-trans bigotry

This election cycle, Republicans displayed their willingness to spread anti-trans bigotry. And that continued this week at a Senate hearing about the pitfalls of legalized sports betting.

Thanks in part to the ease with which even novice betters can make wagers online, the hype around sports betting has reached a fever pitch. And as a result, gambling addiction experts have taken notice of bankruptcies, lost homes and ruined relationships stemming from unhealthy gambling habits. Along with that, college athletes have faced death threats and other forms of abuse from angry fans upset over lost bets.

Put another way, sports betting is a true crisis afflicting college sports and the United States writ large — versus the manufactured crisis that conservatives have conjured out of the mere existence of trans athletes.

And, in fact, much of Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing was actually pertinent to the discussion, focusing on things like the dangers of prop bets and online threats. But two Republicans on the committee, Missouri’s Josh Hawley and Louisiana’s John Kennedy, clearly had ulterior motives, as both essentially steered the conversation off-course with anti-trans attacks.

Hawley used the opportunity to attack NCAA President Charlie Baker over the NCAA’s deference to federal courts in allowing the small number of trans women who play college sports — Baker said he was aware of fewer than 10 transgender athletes out of 510,000 student-athletes overall — to participate on women’s teams. Hawley also bemoaned trans women being allowed to use locker rooms of their choosing and falsely claimed that five NCAA women’s volleyball teams “had to” forfeit games because of a trans player on the opposing team.

You can watch Hawley’s exchange with Baker here:

Kennedy’s tirade was equally bigoted, as he insisted a “biological male” competing in sports has an advantage “every time” over a “biological female” — a claim unsupported by evidence yet one that a seemingly exasperated Baker, who formerly was the Republican governor of Massachusetts, said he agreed with — at least according to Kennedy’s definitions.

Republicans have homed in on trans people as their political piñatas in the wake of an election in which they most likely reaped rewards for doing so. And the questioning from Hawley and Kennedy is a harbinger of the kind of bigoted scapegoating we can expect once Republicans take over the Senate in January.