When Alabama State Rep. Susan DuBose was sponsoring a bill to restrict women’s college athletic competitions to women, she got the predictable first question: “Why do you want to stop transgender people from playing sports?” the reporter asked. The question wasn’t unexpected. The ACLU had condemned the bill for its supposed “fearmongering around trans experience in our state.”
“I explained that I was passing this legislation to protect women athletes and ensure they have a level playing field. We got that straight right from the beginning, and I went on to say that, in Alabama, we know what a woman is. We have common sense and the people of Alabama support this bill.”
The bill passed and was signed into law by Alabama Governor Kay Ivey last year. It should be emphasized: The act does not ban transgender-identifying individuals from participating in sports; it simply mandates that they participate based on their actual sex. Alabama already had a law requiring that athletes in public high schools compete according to their sex. DuBose’s bill merely expanded that law.

“I was thankful that Alabama had a law protecting athletes in grades K-12,” DuBose recalls. “But we needed to extend it through the college level to protect our competitive female athletes. I approached our House leadership with information provided by Alliance Defending Freedom that showed states that had passed similar legislation faced no repercussions from the NCAA. Our House Majority Leader, Scott Stadthagen, said ‘Okay, run with it. So, my very first bill right out of the chute was protecting women’s sports through the collegiate level. This is the law I cut my teeth on in the Alabama legislature, my very first bill.”
Why wouldn’t colleges welcome such a law?
“Well, because they’re afraid of lawsuits,” DuBose said. “They’re afraid that somebody’s going to want to play otherwise. Ultimately, everybody was fine with the bill. None of the colleges ended up complaining about it. I just had to do a little bit of educating.”
“I explained that I was passing this legislation to protect women athletes and ensure they have a level playing field. … I went on to say that, in Alabama, we know what a woman is. We have common sense and the people of Alabama support this bill.”
When Susan DuBose was elected to the Alabama state House in 2022, she was determined to be a “voice for women.” It’s fair to say that the freshman legislator and former banker, a self-described “policy nerd,” is making good on that promise. DuBose carried the “What Is a Woman?” bill earlier this year. The bill takes its cue from IWF and IW Law Center’s commonsense “Women’s Bill of Rights” model legislation.
“I first learned about the Women’s Bill of Rights,” DuBose told IWF, “when I was going through a training session for new legislators. Catherine Robertson, the chief legal counsel to Attorney General Marshall, was leading the discussion on constitutional issues, and she offhandedly mentioned that there was this new Women’s Bill of Rights out there and that we should adopt it in Alabama.
“I made note of it and then went back later and looked it up. IWF had a WBOR resolution that defined sex-based terms—male, female, man and women—by the time-honored biological definitions. I believed it should be written in legislative form and codified into Alabama Law. We were able to write the legislation with IWF research, expertise, and experience gained from working with other states to pass similar legislation. It helped me greatly to meet and hear the stories of athletes Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan representing IWF. Paula spoke eloquently at my Judicial Committee hearing. I carried the bill successfully with bipartisan support out of the House, but it died on the Senate floor on the last day of the session. My goal is to pre-file the bill and pass it early in our next session.”
When Susan DuBose was elected to the Alabama state House in 2022, she was determined to be a “voice for women.” It’s fair to say that the freshman legislator and former banker, a self-described “policy nerd,” is making good on that promise.
Susan DuBose is a lifelong Republican, who grew up in the beautiful and historical town of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, where her father owned a small gun shop and her mother was a systems analyst. “My family loved politics and we loved to debate,” DuBose recalled. “We were always paying attention to what was going on in current events and we discussed it often. Honestly, I got a love of politics from my mother and my grandmother. My grandmother slept with an eight-by-ten photo of Ronald Reagan by her bed.
“We believed in individual responsibility, pulling your own weight, and being accountable for your own actions. There was a time while I was in elementary school when we could have qualified for free lunches. My mother said, no, we will not accept free lunches. You can make your own lunch. We don’t need to accept anything from the government that you can do for yourself. My sister and I learned to work hard and become independent, fearing, contributing members of society. My husband and I passed those same values on to our children.
“That was the mentality especially in the South, that you worked hard to provide for yourself and your family. You had no expectations that you were entitled to anything other than what you earned.
“That work ethic and that sense of individual responsibility has changed today, and it makes me sad for our future generations. We have all won the lottery by simply being born in the United States of America and having the opportunity to make our own path in life,” DuBose continued. “I attribute my success to hard work. I don’t think I was necessarily any smarter, but I knew I could achieve my goals through hard work. I worked the breakfast shift at Hardee’s when I was in high school. I worked at that particular fast-food restaurant because our family had only one car and it was within walking distance.
“I liked to work the morning shift beginning at 5:30 am because I could end my shift at either 10:30 or 2:30 in the summer and still have time to hang out with my friends at the beach. I valued the money I made because it gave me the opportunity to buy things for myself and learn the value of a dollar. I believe the minimum wage at that time was $2.05 and then I received a raise after a couple of years to $2.15 an hour. I knew from that moment on I could always work hard, provide for myself, and be a success. It is with that work ethic in mind that I carried a bill this year that was passed and signed into law by Governor Ivey. The new law allows 14-and 15-year-olds to work after school without permission from the government. I felt it was important to develop a work ethic early in life and my fellow legislators, both Republican and Democrats agreed.”
With such an emphasis on achievement, it’s no surprise that DuBose gained a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Alabama and went on to earn a master’s of business administration from Spring Hill College. Susan met her husband and launched her banking career while still studying at the University of South Alabama. “I interviewed on campus for a job with Central Bank to participate in their management training program. And that turned out to be the opportunity of a lifetime. I was given a job right at the end of my senior year. I was assigned to work at the Central Bank in Mobile, which was great because I didn’t have to move, that’s where I had gone to school, and that’s where my friends were. I worked in Mobile, got married, and my husband and I moved up to Birmingham when I got a promotion. My husband was a CPA and he knew he could find a job wherever. I only worked for one bank, Central Bank, which became Compass Bank, and then BBVA Compass, and they’ve been bought out since then.”
DuBose wasn’t one of those people bound and determined to enter politics. Banking was her first professional love. “I did commercial real estate and construction lending, and I absolutely loved it. I loved looking at projects, seeing them, and taking them from beginning to end, especially when I got to go out of the bank and look at a project site. I found it intriguing and interesting, and absolutely loved it. When I had my second child, we decided it would be best for our family for me to stay at home with the kids. I embraced my new role which allowed me to serve the primary role in raising our children but also allowed me time to volunteer in the school, church, and other non-profit organizations. Ultimately having the opportunity to be a stay-at-home Mom was the joy of my life. Dennis and I consider raising our two adult children to be independent, accomplished adults will always be our greatest success in life.”
She ran for office in 2021 only when she thought her district was not being well-represented, unseating an incumbent Republican. She represents Alabama’s 45th district which includes the Hoover, Leeds, Chelsea, and Irondale areas just south of Birmingham. Susan and Dennis have been married for 36 years and have two adult children. She had been active with the North Shelby County Republican Women, the Methodist Church, Daughters of the American Revolution, and the American Heart Association. She is a recent Club for Growth Fellow and enjoys conservative policy dialogue with the Philadelphia Society. As a legislator, she serves on the House Education Policy Committee, Health Committee, and Fiscal Policy Committee.
School choice is an issue near to DuBose’s heart. “I am a big proponent of school choice,” she told IWF. “I campaigned on school choice, even though I live in a district where the schools are very good. People move to my district for the schools, so many parents in my district would not leave the public school system. But throughout the state of Alabama, there are so many places where kids are zoned for a failing school. These kids cannot afford to move to another district with better schools. So school choice will allow parents to choose the best method of educating their children with access to an Education Savings Account that will send funds directly to another school whether it is private, charter, Christian, Parochial, virtual, micro-school, or homeschool.
“In Birmingham for example, we have Woodlawn High School, where, recently, less than 1% of the graduates read at grade level or performed math at grade level. That is simply unacceptable and now students can choose with their feet and select a more successful method of education. We anticipate schools popping up because of this. I can just see the free enterprise system and American ingenuity taking off. We knew when we passed the CHOOSE ACT in Alabama that many schools were in favor of school choice because they knew they had the capacity to expand their schools to a larger footprint. Faith Academy in Mobile is the largest Christian-based school in the state, and they were in favor of universal school choice because they see it as a mission opportunity to help families in our state. With $7,000 annually per student available through education savings accounts that would more than cover the tuition at Faith Academy.”
Most recently, DuBose has been touring the State of Alabama with Attorney General Steve Marshall and Alliance Defending Freedom educating the public on the harm of the Biden administration’s radical rewrite of Title IX guidelines. “We have been holding town halls discussing the outrageous overreach of the Biden administration to change the Title IX law that Congress passed in 1972, overriding 50 years of progress for women. And this ruling, this overreach—not even voted on by a single person—will devastate opportunities for women in education. We’re waiting on a ruling from the judge to see if we can get a temporary injunction on this egregious overreach. And we’re hoping that we’ll be successful because several other states have been successful. We’ve had very good rulings from judges who understand the detriment that this rule change will do, not just in women’s sports, but in women’s spaces; and it violates freedom of speech by compelling people to use pronouns that they know are incorrect.”
We’re banking on Susan DuBose to represent commonsense and to be a principled voice for American women in Alabama, and the entire country.