Status: 🔴 Mississippi Governor ® who signed SB 2536 (2021) — the first anti-trans sports ban signed into law in the United States — and HB 1125 (2023), banning gender-affirming care for minors
Tate Reeves is the Republican Governor of Mississippi, in office since January 2020. He holds two anti-trans “firsts”: on March 11, 2021 he signed SB 2536, the first bill of its kind in the U.S. to become law barring transgender girls from school sports, and in February 2023 he signed HB 1125 banning gender-affirming medical care for minors.
Reeves framed the 2021 sports ban as a response to President Biden’s executive order affirming federal LGBTQ+ protections, telling reporters the measure pushed back on the administration. The law took effect July 1, 2021.
Reeves signed SB 2536 on March 11, 2021, making Mississippi the first state in the nation to enact a transgender sports ban. The law requires public schools, colleges, and universities to designate athletic teams according to “biological sex,” bars government agencies from taking adverse action against schools that exclude trans athletes, and requires disputes over a student’s gender to be resolved by a physician examination of reproductive anatomy, testosterone levels, and genetic makeup.
In a Facebook post supporting the restrictions, Reeves wrote that he didn’t “understand why politicians are pushing children into transgenderism in the first place. And my heart breaks for the young women across America who will lose in this radical social experiment.”
Critics noted the law was “a solution in search of a problem”: no Mississippi trans athlete had been the subject of any competitive dispute, and HRC noted 55 major U.S. corporations and nearly 550 college athletes opposed such legislation. The Mississippi ACLU said the bill “isn’t about protecting fairness in women’s sports. It’s about erasing and excluding trans people from participation in all aspects of public life.”
On February 28, 2023, Reeves signed HB 1125 (the “Regulate Experimental Adolescent Procedures Act”), prohibiting surgeries, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones for minors under 18, allowing license revocation for providers, creating civil lawsuits with a 30-year statute of limitations, and barring insurance or Medicaid reimbursement for gender-affirming care.