The House has voted to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports.
CNN reports that the GOP-led House voted on Tuesday (Jan. 14) to pass the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 legislation. The bill was sent through in a 218-206 vote and would amend Title IX—the landmark federal civil rights law that barred federally funded schools from practicing “sex-based discrimination.”
According to the new legislation, “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 amendment would make it so that “sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” However, the bill doesn’t specifically point out how the bill would be enforced.
President Joe Biden’s campaign had promised to fight for and protect the rights of LGBTQIA+ students, with the Biden administration issuing updated regulations to Title IX with the intent of “bolstering federal protections” for the community in April 2024. But the bill looks to undo these regulations, foreshadowing the agenda of the new incoming administration.
With President-elect Donald Trump days away from being sworn into office, Republicans are making good on the promises of MAGA to use federal obscenity laws to outlaw gender non-conformity. Throughout the 2024 election cycle, Trump and his cohorts spent at least $7 million on ads, per NPR, targeting Vice President Kamala Harris and her 2019 campaign supporting gender-affirming surgery for transgender people, driving home the cultural divide between the two parties. And, in the aftermath of Trump’s shocking win, many pundits believed it was the identity politics and culture wars that led to Republicans taking back the White House.
Stephen A. Smith most recently questioned voting for Harris, voicing his frustrations with her campaign’s focus on identity politics instead of more “practical things.” The First Take host even went as far as saying that he felt “guilted” into voting for the Democratic nominee.
“When you hear people talking about practical, practical things, and then I saw folks on the left basically trying to guilt me into voting for you, you know, it bothered me,” he admitted on The Rubin Report. “I might have ended up voting for Kamala Harris because I didn’t like how Trump acts, but what I didn’t do was call him a racist. I didn’t call him a Nazi.”
“I knew Trump before he ran for president. We talked on the phone. We talk at basketball games or boxing events. I knew this man, and so some of the things that were being said about him I knew were not true, and I was saying, ‘Come on y’all, you got to do better than that.’”
Leave a comment