House GOP wants to pass another trans sports ban after passing one earlier in the year

Even though the House of Representatives passed a bill to ban transgender students from participating in school sports in April – a bill that has not even been taken up by the Democratic-majority Senate – Republicans are going to introduce another bill this week with the same goal in what appears to be an effort to make transgender rights a central issue in the 2024 elections.

The new bill, entitled the Save Women’s Sports Act, would require grade schools, colleges, and universities to ban trans girls and women from participating in sports as their gender or risk losing federal funding. The bill includes private schools that receive federal assistance. Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI) will introduce it later this week.

Related:

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AOC blasted state policies that force genital examinations on minors if anyone accuses a student athlete of not being the “right” gender.

The bill is not very different from Rep. Greg Steube’s (R-FL) Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which passed in April. That bill seeks to amend Title IX to say that sex is “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth” and would rescind federal funding from schools if they allow “a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls.”

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Title IX is the federal law that bans discrimination based on sex in education. Many judges and the Biden administration have interpreted it as banning anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination as well since it’s impossible to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity without taking sex into account.

Steube’s bill passed in a 219-203 party-line vote. The Senate hasn’t taken up the bill, and President Joe Biden said in April that he would veto it if the Senate somehow passed it.

That is, the bills are functionally the same, and McClain didn’t respond to The Hill’s questions about how her bill is different from the one that passed in April.

McClain’s bill comes less than a week after she held a hearing about transgender people’s participation in sports. No transgender people were invited to speak as witnesses at the hearing that was ostensibly about transgender people. McClain, as chair of the Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services, went on a rant about transgender people at the hearing.

“I will not stop protecting women,” she said. “The Biden administration is weakening Title IX by allowing males who identify as women to participate in women’s sports.”

“Most everyone up here on the other side of the aisle has endorsed a person that has been found liable for sexual abuse of women to be our president of the United States,” Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) said at the hearing, “but we are going to talk about how this party is going to protect women.”