(NewsNation) — As some state legislatures moved to ban transgender athletes from competing against women and girls, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox tried to put the brakes on a 2022 measure that lawmakers passed in Salt Lake City.
Cox, a Republican, said he didn’t oppose the idea of regulating school athletics but faulted legislators for making significant changes at the last minute. And in a highly publicized veto message, he addressed the plight of transgender youths, whom he said were not affecting women’s sports in Utah schools.
At the time, Cox said, there were four transgender athletes playing sports — one playing in girls’ sports — against a backdrop of 75,000 student athletes in Utah. He said the small group represented “four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something … four kids trying to get through each day.”
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“Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live,” Cox said.
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Lawmakers overrode his veto of House Bill 11, but Cox, considered a conservative, moderate member of the GOP, received high marks from transgender advocates for showing empathy at a divisive time. He would later become 2023-24 chair of the National Governors Association and pushed the message, “Disagree Better.”
“It’s not about learning how to disagree better, it’s about remembering how to disagree better,” Cox told NewsNation in 2023. “Our nation was founded on this, it was torn apart in the 1850s and the 1860s in a civil war, and we are headed in that direction if we don’t all remember what it is that made our country great, and we all start acting like it.”
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“There’s nothing more un-American than hating our fellow Americans,” added Cox.
The second-term governor’s profile rose significantly last week, following the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University. Cox was among officials who quickly labeled it a political assassination, though authorities have not laid out the motives of alleged sniper Tyler Robinson.
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Cox, appearing at a series of news conferences, condemned Kirk’s murder as an attack on democracy and urged Americans to reject political violence.
“At some point we have to find an off ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse,” he said.
Over the weekend, Cox told NBC the suspect in Kirk’s killing was not cooperating with investigators. Authorities instead were aided by information from cooperating family members and Robinson’s roommate, whom Cox described as a boyfriend transitioning from male to female, to understand what happened.
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“The why behind this, again, we’re all drawing lots of conclusions and how someone like this could be radicalized,” Cox said of Robinson. “And I think that those are important questions for us to ask and important questions for us to answer.”
Cox has called for the death penalty in the case. Formal charges against Robinson are expected Tuesday.
