Dive Temporary:
- Home Republicans signaled final week that one in every of their high legislative priorities might be passing a invoice that might prohibit transgender college students’ participation in sports activities.
- Home lawmakers final week outlined 12 precedence items of laws for the Republican-controlled chamber, together with the Safety of Girls and Women in Sports activities Act. The invoice would amend Title IX to ban federally funded faculties or Ok-12 faculties from permitting transgender women and girls to take part on sports activities groups aligning with their gender id.
- Rep. Greg Steube, a Republican from Florida, reintroduced the invoice Friday with the backing of 56 different GOP lawmakers. Lawmakers plan to contemplate the proposed laws on the Home flooring within the “coming weeks,” based on a latest announcement from Home Speaker Mike Johnson.
Dive Perception:
Steube has been making an attempt to go the anti-transgender proposal for a number of years. In 2023, Home lawmakers handed the invoice, 219-203, however Senate lawmakers by no means voted on companion laws of their chamber.
GOP lawmakers could have a neater time passing the proposal now that they’ve management of the presidency, the Senate and the Home. “Republicans have promised to guard girls’s sports activities, and underneath President Trump’s management, we’ll fulfill this promise,” Steube mentioned in a Friday assertion.
The invoice’s textual content says it doesn’t prohibit establishments from “allowing males to coach or apply” with girls’s groups as long as “no feminine is disadvantaged of a roster spot” or different athletic advantages.
President-elect Donald Trump has expressed assist for such a measure, vowing throughout marketing campaign rallies that his administration would preserve “males out of ladies’s sports activities,” PBS reported. He has additionally promised to undo the Biden administration’s extensively contested Title IX rule, which supplies protections for LGBTQI+ college students however has been blocked in at the least 26 states.
The Biden administration had additionally proposed a separate Title IX rule on athletics that might have prohibited blanket bans on transgender athletes taking part on groups aligning with their gender identities. Nonetheless, the administration withdrew the proposal in late December, citing quite a few authorized challenges over athletic eligibility underneath Title IX.
Opponents of Steube’s invoice have argued that it could create limitations for transgender college students, who already face heightened threat of experiencing violence and psychological well being points.
In 2023, when Home Republicans handed the measure, California Democrat Mark Takano mentioned the invoice would make “college sports activities much less honest by singling out and banning transgender girls and ladies as younger as kindergarten from taking part on college sports activities groups with their buddies,” NBC Information reported.
“We all know transgender college students already face widespread bullying and discrimination,” Takano mentioned on the time. “Including to their ache by focusing on their participation at school sports activities is each fallacious and harmful.”
The problem has roiled some school campuses.
Final yr, gamers and coaches at a handful of faculties sued the Mountain West Convention and San José State College, alleging that they had been violating Title IX by permitting a transgender girl to play on the establishment’s girls’s volleyball crew. A number of volleyball groups have forfeited matches towards San José State due to the participant.
Forward of the convention’s event in November, a federal decide rejected a request to dam the participant from taking part.