The 119th U.S. Congress has indicated that taking legislative action to ban trans athletes from women’s and girls’ sports will be a top priority this month.
The House rules package for the 119th Congress was posted this week, and the first step in its order of business is a bill that would bring about Title IX revisions that would only allow athletes to compete in the gender category that they were assigned at birth.
“A bill to amend the Education Amendments of 1972 to provide that for purposes of determining compliance with title IX of such Act in athletics, sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth,” the first point in the final section of the package reads.
The package stated that the bill would be the first of 12 bills under separate consideration, with one hour of debate.
Republicans re-took control of the White House and Senate while retaining the House of Representatives in November’s election after a heated campaign season in which trans inclusion in women’s sports became a key issue.
President-elect Donald Trump pledged to instill a full-on ban on trans athletes in women’s sports to the near unanimous support of Republican allies.
Currently, 25 states in the U.S. have laws in place to restrict or prevent trans athletes from competing in women’s sports. But the other 25 states have no such laws and many, like California, even have laws in place to specifically enable trans athletes to compete against women or girls.
But even the states with laws in place to prevent trans athletes in women’s sports have had their laws overridden by federal judges this year. Judges Landya McCafferty of New Hampshire and M. Hannah Lauck of Virginia each passed rulings in 2024 that enabled biological males to play on high school girls’ soccer and tennis teams. Both judges were appointed by former President Obama in the early 2010s.
Meanwhile, Democrats have endorsed multiple bills that would allow trans inclusion in women’s sports at the national level, including the Equality Act and the Transgender Bill of Rights.
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It was an issue that prompted fierce criticism against Democrats and the Biden administration from the day President Biden took office in January 2021.
On his first day in office, he issued an executive order on “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.” The order included a section that read, “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.”
The administration then issued a sweeping rule that clarified that Title IX’s ban on “sex” discrimination in schools covers discrimination based on gender identity, sexual orientation and “pregnancy or related conditions,” in April. The administration insisted the regulation does not address athletic eligibility. However, multiple experts presented evidence to Fox News Digital in June that it would ultimately put more biological men in women’s sports.
Multiple states filed lawsuits and enacted their own laws to address this issue, and then the Supreme Court then voted 5-4 in August to reject an emergency request by the Biden administration to enforce its sweeping changes in those states.
The issue proved to be one of the key campaign vulnerabilities for Vice President Harris and Democrats across the nation in the past election.
A national exit poll conducted by the Concerned Women for America legislative action committee found that 70% of moderate voters saw the issue of “Donald Trump’s opposition to transgender boys and men playing girls’ and women’s sports and of transgender boys and men using girls’ and women’s bathrooms” as important to them.
And 6% said it was the most important issue of all, while 44% said it was “very important.”
Multiple Democrats have since withdrawn their support for it. Biden’s Department of Education gave up on a proposed rule change that would have punished schools for preventing trans athletes from competing in women’s sports in December. The rule was proposed in April 2023, but it is now just a failed venture as Biden prepares to leave office.
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