The U.S. House of Representatives has approved legislation that aims to bar transgender women and girls from participating in female athletic programs in schools.
The House passed the bill, titled the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” on Tuesday, though it was a divided vote, 218 to 206, almost entirely on party lines.
The bill would prohibit federal funding from going to K-12 schools that include transgender students on women’s sports teams. It seeks to amend federal law to require that “sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth,” to determine compliance with Title IX in athletics, according to the legislative text.
Although it was passed by the House, the bill still needs to be approved by the Senate, and ultimately signed by the President, to become law. At the Senate level, it’s far from certain the bill will be passed, as seven Democrats would have to join the Republicans in voting in favor of it.
Barring trans participation in female sports was part of the Republican platform in the recent U.S. election, arguing that transgender women hold physical advantages over cisgender women, while Democrats have generally been opposed to these types of bills and believe the policies discriminate against transgender students and could be harmful to their mental health.
The New York Times reports that just two Democrats joined all Republicans in voting in favor of the bill, while another Democrat simply voted “present,” declining to take a position.
“The overwhelming majority believe men don’t belong in women’s sports,” said Representative Greg Steube, the Florida Republican who sponsored the measure, according to The New York Times. “This bill will deliver upon the mandate the American people gave Congress.”
Democrats, however, have dubbed the bill the “Child Predator Empowerment Act,” and claim it’s an invasion of privacy for young girls that puts them at greater risk.
The New York Times report adds: “(Democrats) also pointed to the bill as the latest example of an unhealthy fixation among Republicans with trying to restrict the rights of transgender individuals, when they could be spending their time passing legislation to create jobs or reduce the prices of groceries.”
The bill would not “prohibit schools or institutions from permitting males to practice against women’s sports teams,” according to a fact sheet from the House committee on Education and the Workforce.
It doesn’t prohibit males from training or practicing with an athletic program or activity designated for women or girls, “so long as no female is deprived of a roster spot on a team or sport, opportunity to participate in a practice or competition, scholarship, admission to an educational institution, or any other benefit that accompanies participating in the athletic program or activity,” the legislative text reads, according to CNN.
However, the Education committee fact sheet states that under the bill, “a recipient of federal education funding violates Title IX’s prohibition against sex discrimination if the recipient operates, sponsors, or facilitates athletic programs or activities and allows a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls.”
The participation of transgender women in female sports came to the forefront during the 2021-22 NCAA season, when University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas competed on the women’s team after transitioning from male to female in 2019.
Thomas won the 2022 Women’s NCAA title in the 500 freestyle, and also tied for 5th in the 200 free and 8th in the 100 free. She has not competed since, opposing World Aquatics’ restriction on transgender participation, but ultimately losing the legal battle in 2024.
World Aquatics has since experimented with an ‘open’ category, where transgender athletes are able to compete.
In April 2024, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) announced a new policy that bans transgender participation in women’s sports.
In 2022, the NCAA updated its transgender policy with a sport-by-sport approach where each discipline’s guidelines would be determined by the existing policy for the national governing body (NGB) of that sport, hoping to align with the Olympic Movement.
The right-wing took a legitimate concern about competitive fairness and spun it into a hateful anti-trans witch hunt. I believe the NCAA, in striving for inclusion (admirable) got it wrong on the competitive fairness front. The original rule (to allow an athlete who was born male, went through puberty, and later began taking hormone therapy to begin competing in the women’s division after one year) was based on peripheral scientific research that does not directly apply to swimming.
Unfortunately, the left dug in it’s heels and refused to admit that the rule could possibly have missed the mark on the fairness front.
Then, the right ran with it and started fear-mongering. They took an element of truth (about competitive fairness)… Read more »
Good take
I was a woman in high school and NCAA swimming years ago.
It’s imperative that high schools and university athletic departments balance two (important, and occasionally conflicting) sets of interests:
1) Setting up parameters around sports that provide basic competitive fairness. The original motivation for “women’s swimming” was the observation that people born as women are at a physical disadvantage compared to people born as men.
2) Providing as much inclusion and opportunity to participate as possible. We need to recognize that sports are more than just competition, and this is especially true for school teams. Being a member of a team is an opportunity for education, physical fitness, community, camaradarie, and belonging. There’s value is including more young people,… Read more »
No bias in this whatsoever…
While I generally agree with this, statements phrased this way only serve to divide people: “the EVIL, FEARMONGERING, AND ALSO EVIL right versus the RIGHTEOUS AND ADMIRABLE (but maybe mistaken a little bit) left”. It kind of seems like this is more to just bash the right than anything else.
I think most people in the middle probably would back the solution of changing the divisions to Cis Women and Open, rather than just Women and Men. However, like everything in politics, the extreme tend to out-shout the moderate, which to your point ended up in a few steps backwards when it came to trans hate. Right wing extremists like Gaines indeed played a large… Read more »
I’ve rolled around the “open and women divisions” solution and I can’t get around it being anything other than ‘banning transwomen who have undergone any sort of HRT,” can you help me get there?
I guess I’m also willing to recognize that there’s maybe not a real middle ground, and that window dressing on an exclusionary policy might be the best we’ll ever get to.
The original point of women’s athletics was to provide a fairer ground for women to compete in, as men would kind of crush them in competition, especially in a sport like swimming. I don’t think that’s up for debate. Now, we have two new types of athlete – transitioning men and transitioning women – speaking in terms of sex.
My speculation is that transitioning men will have a distinct advantage over cisgender women given the HRT, and transitioning women will have an advantage over cisgender women depending on how long they’ve been able to develop, although if they transition early enough (pre-puberty?) there might be room for debate. I think similar logic follows as to why cisgender men would… Read more »
Neither the NCAA nor Riley Gaines got this right, but I still believe that the NCAA and most university athletics programs want do the right thing (making space for both fairness and inclusion). I don’t think Riley Gaines wants to do the right thing. I live in Tennessee, and she put out a bunch of political ads talking about “dangerous trans people in locker rooms.” At best, she’s leveraging this opportunity to build her own political career.
The left should not have dug in its heels on the competitive fairness issue, but I do personally believe that they have a morally superior position. I also think that (if forced to choose) inclusion is the more important goal when it comes… Read more »
A great day for women’s sports and for women’s rights in general.
A few questions to consider:
Regulatory authorities are now obligated to the health information and birth certificates of all athletes. We did it reddit!
It is actually also possible to change your birth certificate.
Completely unrelated to everything this article is about, but I have a teammate from high school who swam at Penn with Will Thomas(Important context in that this was pre transition to Lia) and was also friends at Penn with Luigi Mangione
Keep an eye on him in 2027, apparently they all get fairly noteworthy every 3 years
Wow, small world! I think it’s preferable to phrase as “…with Lia before she transitioned and was…” for clarity and omission of deadname :’)
I wonder if Lia and Luigi know each other 👀
Nah, no preference – let’s save up for the more important battles in life instead.
Yes, because treating people with dignity is unimportant.
America has bigger issues than trans-athletes competing in sports.
But its still an issue
Where would you rank the 12 trans NCAA athletes who compete in the list of issues – because for me it’s so far down the list of legitimate things we are facing it’s not worthy of mention. But please, tell us why the federal govt is getting involved.
And the FBI, CIA and Military can handle those other issues. The NCAA however should find this issue right in its bailiwick, and Congress can multitask
“Haven’t you better things to do?” is the weakest of weak sauce arguments.
I think some of you would benefit from reading The Sports Gene by David Epstein (also the author of Range). He looks at the science and when you read his book, you realize that it isn’t always a simple binary issue. He’s a science writer and not a moralist on this issue, although the advantages that men typically have seem to lead him to agree that trans women who went through male puberty would have an unfair advantage in women’s competitive sports. But he isn’t anti-trans in general. If you want to listen to a brief synopsis of his work, he recently appeared on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast to discuss the issue, I think in part because of… Read more »
I didn’t realize he was doing press hits about this kinda thing, ty for the rec!
I still bring up an anecdote from that book about sprinting speed to people all the time.
(It’s about increased genetic diversity among people of direct African descent – sure, I’ll buy they’re overrepresented in an Olympic 100m sprint final. But the *slowest* people in the world probably also come from the same pool – it’s a wider distribution, we just don’t test for slowest. So more people pop up at both ends of the spectrum, but we only notice one end.)
A point he makes in the book is that Africa is the most genetically diverse continent. But in terms of this conversation, he talks about biology and testosterone. There are athletes who only find out that they have a certain genetic makeup when they begin to be tested by sports governing bodies.
The history of gender in sports is super interesting and complex. To your point about sex testing, it largely targets women of color, particularly those from Africa, due to white western standards of beauty and the public’s perfection of what it means to be feminine. That is why athletes like Semenya, Chand, and Khelif were ultimately selected to undergo sex testing and would later find out they were born with differences in sex. It would be interesting to know how many female athletes escaped the cruel testing by being “white enough” or “feminine enough” to escape undergoing this testing, despite also being intersex. Gender and sex in sports is rooted in racism, and this is just another aspect which will… Read more »
You are historically illiterate, blinded by your own theories of racial politics – as far back as Helen Stephens and Stella walsh, Dora Ratjen, the vast majority of major cases about sex testing in sport and DSDs have been around pasty white europeans and their descendents.
The reason greater numbers of black and brown athletes NOW seem to be caught in DSD cases is relatively straightforward. They tend to live in countries with less advanced infant health care and conservative social mores. They also tend to come from countries where agents and coaches – usually white as it happens – have a vested interest in finding them and exploiting them – see Namibian track sprinting or the Zambian women’s soccer… Read more »
I never said they were sex testing. I believe the testing they do now creates what they call a bio passport, where they look at different levels of hormones in your body. People just have different levels of things like testosterone. They look for changes in the levels of the hormones instead of just the presence of them. It’s been a minute since I’ve read about that, and I am making a basic statement on it, so take my statement for general accuracy vs precision. But I believe it is when doing this testing that they have discovered that someone was intersex.
One comment that Epstein made in the interview is that if you’re seeking fairness, a trans female… Read more »
Right! And I ran across that stat again recently, and thought I remembered him talking about it to explain that sprint speed thing.
Which should also predict similar things elsewhere, but much harder to control for that
There was never any attempt to get creative with trans athletes competing as women. For example, we could have just eliminated some of the difference by allowing everyone to take PEDs. Given male puberty requires a higher level of testosterone than a woman going through puberty has, re-level the playing field by allowing women to take anabolic steroids. And/or handicap the trans athlete by adding a time penalty, like a back marker in sprinting. This has precedent in professional track sprinting so why not swimming? To be clear I’m not advocating one way or the other, just seems like there was never any attempt to do anything other than a perspective of either allow to compete or don’t allow to… Read more »
The East germans doped their athlete and swimming women to the eyeballs, with no out of competition testing, and won enormous numbers of golds in women’s sport – look at the 1976-83 dominance in the pool. russia was doing the same in junior swimming in the 2010s, with the same results – enormous numbers of girls winning gold, not so much boys, because girls are natural super reponders
Yet these women never approached the men’s times – they destroyed the rdinry women’s times, but never got near the men. Because its not just having testosterone in your system, it how it interacts with your puberty and morphology – pelvic angle, limb density and length, lung capacity. These things can’t be… Read more »
My guess is the Supreme Court eventually hears this issue, makes a ruling, and then we deal with whatever happens next.
That’s the only end to this that I see.
Fingers crossed this decision, as disappointing and over-corrective as I may find it, makes Riley Gaines disappear into obscurity.
Could someone explain the hate Riley gets?
Riley Gaines is a hatemonger. Spend 30 seconds on her Twitter feed and you’ll understand why.
She made up an “attack” by protesters in San Francisco to foment rage. She keeps pushing this narrative that, essentially, Lia sexually assaulted her in the lockerroom.
Riley Gaines is doing a great job at bringing attention to the topic. She’s also doing a great job at keeping any resolutions from happening, because she is not “pro fairness for women in sports,” she’s “anti the existence of trans people.” There are probably a lot of people who would like to have conversations and see what can be done, but they cannot because of Riley’s movement and the polarization it creates through lies.
Riley Gaines… Read more »
No. Riley has never said anything such as “I hate trans people” she simply wants to make sure that biological women have opportunities to compete in sport against biological females. She doesn’t hate trans existence. She has even gone as far as to say she honestly doesn’t care if they identify as they want, as long as they are not hurting other people. The same goes for all human beings. You have the right to do as you wish with your life as long as your not infringing on other people’s rights.
You’re falling for the grift bro.
“As a Christian myself, I entirely see this as spiritual warfare,” said Gaines, who was invited as a special guest speaker. “It’s no longer about right versus wrong or good versus bad. This really is about moral versus evil.”
It won’t make her disappear whether you like it or not. She has been propped up so high by certain media networks and has made so much money because of it. Now, she doesn’t just comment on trans athletes. She has expanded into a ton of other issues that are important to her and the people who think like her.
That was always her goal from the very start: to become another MAGA grifter.
SERIOUS REQUEST: I think the best way to approach this is for COLEMAN HODGES to have Riley on his show for an “Ask Me Anything” interview.
Whether you love her or hate her, this would be an opportunity to hear her thoughts expressed directly to the swimming community. And Coleman is a real pro at this kind of stuff.
FWIW: there are only two retired swimmers on X/Twitter with more than one million followers. The other one lives in Phoenix and promotes a betting site.
They should absolutely not do that.
Go and watch her dumb interview with Brett Hawke, you fool. Riley Gaines doesn’t care about swimming, she only cares about getting paid by right-wing think tanks.
Apparently she makes bank by spewing out unhinged, hateful vitriol + has always been spoiled
Source: teammate who was on a team with her
If she really cared about swimming and women in sports she’d advocate for science-based policies for fair trans inclusion or, I don’t know, expanding access to aquatic facilities, fighting back against House roster cuts, etc etc. It’s all about the attention and $$$
Was Riley Gaines swimming at Kentucky when the coach fired for sexual assault was head coach? Has she condemned him for what he’s been accused of doing?
She spoke out in his favor. Then tried to walk that back. She never condemned his behavior, just sort of a soft, vague, general walkback of supporting him.
This is what has got me all along.. Riley is in support of women’s rights but has done nothing to support Kentucky teammates who were targeted by Lars. She actually shamed girls for struggling under Lars claiming they weren’t tough enough.
It’s almost like she doesn’t care about women’s rights and just hates trans people.