Earlier this month, the House of Representatives passed the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act” with 218 votes, 216 from Republicans and just two from Democrats.
The bill codifies that Title IX, which in 1972 granted equal access to athletic opportunities for female high school and college students by outlawing discrimination on the basis of sex, is predicated on a biological definition of “female” — that when it comes to collegiate athletics, “sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”
In other words, the Title IX provision that women and girls (i.e., people with XX chromosomes) must have equal access to athletic opportunities cannot be met by granting athletic opportunities to people with XY chromosomes who claim a transgender identity.
When Title IX passed in 1972, virtually no one, Democrat or Republican, could have fathomed that such a self-evident clarification would ever be necessary, let alone controversial. But this is 2025, and 206 House Democrats just voted against this bill.
Meanwhile, the newly inaugurated President Trump has signed an executive order reaffirming the common-sense reality that there are only two sexes, male and female, in defiance of the progressive media and educational establishments.
Influential Democrats, congressional and otherwise, seem to have irrevocably squandered an opportunity to neutralize the transgender issue as a Republican political talking point. They have also made a popular and historic mockery of today’s Democratic Party and the educational and media institutions with which it is aligned.
Sex is not an identity but a fact. Most Americans, including most conservatives (vocal exceptions notwithstanding), have little or no problem with men who dress in androgynous or traditionally feminine attire. People of any ideology who want to dictate to other adults what they should wear, how they present themselves, or even what name or pronouns they use are in fact the exception.
But for most Americans, this “live and let live” attitude stops where the elimination of women’s athletics and private spaces begins.
Men should not be permitted to compete on women’s teams, even if they identify as women, for the same reason men should not be permitted to compete on 10-year-old boys’ teams even if they identify as 10-year-old boys. To include them is unfair to the people for whom the athletic category in question was created.
Do 206 House Democrats believe that women’s sports should not exist? To vote as they did is tantamount to saying so. Yet, incredibly, even after widespread recognition that Democrats are on the wrong side of this issue, and that it contributed heavily to their loss in 2024, 206 politicians cast votes that state: “I am willing to feign ignorance of sexual dimorphism, a fact of which every three-year-old is aware.”
This issue, and the blindness to the basic politics it inspires in actual politicians, has no precedent and no equal.
Abortion? Not even close. It has been a complicated issue since the beginning of time, and each side has a rationale grounded in both reason (even if those on the pro-abortion side don’t always want to acknowledge the facts of their own position) and politics (even if those on the pro-life end often drastically overestimate their own appeal).
Defund the police? Nope. Even perhaps the worst slogan in American political history was related to a real and perennial issue of how to balance public order and individual liberty. It may have been a stupid and unpopular answer, but at least it was about something most people acknowledge as a question.
Whether to allow males — regardless of how they identify or dress, or what pronouns they want used — to be female athletes is not such a question. In fact, it is not a question at all. It is a leftist fantasy in which the universal limitation of biological reality is recast as mean-spirited bigotry by transphobic conservatives.
Most Americans see that this emperor is wearing no clothes. They are no longer going to allow him to wear a women’s athletic uniform.
Let’s hope a few Senate Democrats understand this, and that they vote for H.R. 28, if only to retain their own credibility with attentive voters.
Credible opposition to Trump’s party is profoundly important, and has never been more so. Voting for H.R. 28 is a necessary condition for any lawmaker to be taken seriously.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including on Substack.
