Numerous Wyoming Republicans are propping their messaging this election season on trans sports bans.
Which has prompted a debate about who gets credit for the Wyoming’s set of bans on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s school sports.
The reflexive answer is the bills’ sponsor, Sen. Wendy Schuler, R-Evanston. But Schuler in her Tuesday phone interview chuckled at her fairness-in-sports-bills becoming high-profile campaign fodder for others, and said, “it takes a village.”
Her first blanket trans sports ban failed the state House of Representatives in 2022. Her second ban, for grades 7-12, passed the Legislature with 79 Republican lawmakers in favor.
So did her third girls’ sports bill extending the ban to college.
What The Candidates, Or The PACs, Are Saying
Secretary of State Chuck Gray has campaigned on sports fairness in at least one YouTube video in his bid for the GOP nomination to U.S. House.
Also the Protecting Wyoming Values PAC, which backs Gray, dispatched a mailer this summer noting he co-sponsored one of the fairness bills.
As of July 29, that PAC had raised nearly $1 million and was funded exclusively by Gray’s father,
The mailer shows a heavyset, hairy male with an ample chest, wearing a crop top, grimacing down at a soccer ball while smaller females frown behind him.
It also says Gray “made banning biological males from women’s college sports a top priority” and notes that Gray “blasted” politicians who didn’t sue over President Joe Biden’s trans-friendly reinterpretation of federal education laws.
Wyoming sued over those rules in August 2024, three months after Gray lamented it hadn’t.
A message from the campaign of Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder, who is running for governor, says she championed Wyoming’s ban on transgender athletes from high school into college. It also notes she led Wyoming’s 2024 litigation against the Biden administration over its reinterpretation.
And the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which comprises a controversial group of Republican state House legislators, wrote in a Facebook post this week: “We protected women’s sports from men.”
Mailer sent out by the Protecting Wyoming Values PAC supporting Chuck Gray (Courtesy Photo) 
Mailer sent out by the Protecting Wyoming Values PAC supporting Chuck Gray (Courtesy Photo)
The Record
In context, Gray did not mobilize Wyoming’s enacted trans-athlete bans directly because the successful versions passed once Gray was in the executive branch, overseeing elections and business filings.
Degenfelder has not served in the Legislature.
But both Degenfelder and Gray have vocally promoted protections for Wyoming’s female school athletes.
The record reflects that Degenfelder helped to lead the state’s litigation against Biden; and her department offered suggestions to strengthen Wyoming’s first successful trans sports ban. She joined other education chiefs to petition the Biden administration in 2023, and co-authored a column on the topic with U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman last year.
As for the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, whether the bans could have passed without its involvement depends on whom you ask.
Freedom Caucus legislators voted in favor of each proposed ban, each year.
“I don’t think any one group was better at getting it through than all of us,” said Schuler of the Legislature. “I was the biggest cheerleader. But I don’t think any one caucus should pat themselves too much on the back … you have to have a coalition when you’re trying to get a bill passed.”
Schuler said she tries to stay out of division and speak to lawmakers across the political spectrum.
“It’s interesting the other folks are taking a lot of credit for having helped,” said Schuler, with a laugh. “I’m happy if they think they’ve helped in some way shape or form. But it was the Legislature, obviously, that helped get the bill across the finish line.”
Sen. Tara Nethercott in a Sunday Facebook post urged people, “Don’t fall for Cheap Shots. Wyoming’s female athletes have been protected for years.”
The post says that “many candidates, and their caucus, are claiming they fought to protect girls’ and women’s sports.”
It adds, “Credit belongs where it’s due.”
Schuler’s 2022 Bill
Schuler, who is not a member of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, brought her first trans-athlete ban attempt in 2022.
Gray was on his last year in the Legislature. He co-sponsored it.
It proposed a blanket ban on “students of the male sex” from public-school-backed sports from primary school through higher education.
It cleared the Senate with Republican Sens. Nethercott, Cale Case, and Drew Perkins opposed, as well as the chamber’s two Democrats, Sens. Mike Gierau and Chris Rothfuss.
The House killed the bill in a 21-37 vote against resurrecting it from then-House Speaker Eric Barlow’s drawer.
Barlow, now a state senator, is one of Degenfelder’s campaign opponents in the race for governor.
He noted in a Tuesday interview that when the resurrection vote for Schuler’s bill came on March 7, 2022, the Legislature was focused on passing a budget and finishing the required, once-in-a-decade process of re-drawing legislative district lines.
That bill would have died by deadline anyway because the chamber requires a committee vetting, plus one of three House readings per day. And the shortened session was almost over, he added.
The bill “largely mirrored Idaho’s law,” wrote Nethercott in a Sunday Facebook post. And Idaho’s law was immediately challenged and spent four years “tied up in litigation” before the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it in June, she noted.
House Appropriations Chair John Bear, who led the Freedom Caucus at that time, voiced a different take on that vote in a Tuesday text message.
“The small number of conservatives in the early WYFC forced a vote to bring it out of (Barlow’s) drawer, which failed,” wrote Bear. “It wasn’t until the WYFC grew its ranks in the 2022 election cycle that we protected women’s sports, and the (bill that succeeded) didn’t protect ALL sports.”
Bear added:
“It’s clear that these protections never would’ve happened if it weren’t for the WYFC forcing votes and accountability.”
Then Came 2023
In the 2023 general session Schuler brought a narrower bill banning trans sports participation from grades 7-12, with a safety net provision to help the state resolve trans sports cases fairly if a court blocked the ban.
Barlow voted in favor of that bill. So did Nethercott.
“I believe that men should not be participating in women’s or girls sports, period,” said Barlow on Tuesday.
Nethercott’s Facebook post says the bill was “crafted to better withstand constitutional scrutiny, and put protections for Wyoming’s girls into effect years before the Idaho litigation was finally resolved.”
Gray’s now-House opponent Senate President Bo Biteman co-sponsored that bill. Yet, Biteman has not campaigned extensively, if at all, on this issue.
Biteman did not immediately return a Tuesday voicemail request for comment.
The bill became law.
“I thought about (adding) the collegiate section then,” said Schuler. But she decided to test the waters with the high school ban, she added.
One more budget session, 2024, passed without changes to Wyoming’s trans sports law.
The Volleyballer
That autumn, the University of Wyoming’s women’s volleyball team started boycotting games with San Jose State University – after news broke that one of SJSU’s top players was transgender.
Some UW volleyball women are still in litigation over what they’ve called a breach of federal education law.
Schuler decided to broach the college sports topic again in the 2025 lawmaking session. So did another non-Freedom Caucus lawmaker, Rep. Martha Lawley, R-Worland.
“Hers was a little different than mine but not drastically,” Schuler recalled in a nod to Lawley.
Lawley’s bill didn’t pass. Schuler’s did.
Degenfelder testified in favor of the concept.
Wyoming now bans trans participation in girls and women’s public school sports from grades seven through college.
Gray Says
Gray in a Tuesday text message said he has a track record of protecting girls and women’s sports, and led the motion to foist the 2022 bill from Barlow’s drawer.
Gray blamed its late-session failure on “insiders and the Left” and said, “Only after we continued the pressure to advance this common sense measure in 2022 and 2023 did it ever happen.”
“We must protect girls and women’s sports,” said Gray, adding that he would “continue working to protect girls and women’s sports as a member of Congress.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
