Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Mar 4, 2025 / 10:50 am (CNA).
Senate Democrats joined together to block Republican-backed legislation that would have permanently banned biological men from participating in women’s sports at K–12 schools and colleges that receive federal funding.
The bill’s Republican backers needed at least seven Democrats to support a procedural vote on the legislation for it to advance to a final vote in the Senate but did not receive any. Although a majority of senators backed the legislation on a 51-45 vote, the proposal failed to reach the necessary three-fifths supermajority.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, introduced the bill, dubbed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025. A similar bill narrowly passed the House of Representatives in late January with two Democrats joining the Republican majority in support of it.
The bill would have amended Title IX — a 1972 federal law that prohibits discrimination based on a person’s “sex.” It would have clarified that the word “sex” in Title IX’s section on athletics referred solely to a “person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth” — not a person’s self-professed gender identity.
Under the proposed language, biological men who identify as transgender women would be ineligible to compete in any athletics competition that is reserved for women.
Kristen Waggoner, the president of Alliance Defending Freedom, expressed disappointment in the Senate’s failure to advance the legislation.
“Women and girls deserve their own sports and spaces,” Waggoner said in a post on X.
“They deserve fairness and dignity, both on the playing field and in their locker rooms,” she said. “And they deserve to know exactly who is voting against fairness, safety, and equal opportunity for female athletes.”
Mike Zamore, the national director of policy and government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union, in a statement commended the Democratic opposition to the legislation.
“As anyone paying attention to the actions of the [President Donald] Trump administration can tell you, this bill is simply one part of a sweeping effort to push transgender people out of public life altogether,” Zamore said. “We need more attention on actually ensuring fair and equal opportunity for all girls and women, not inflicting invasive and humiliating checks and bullying on kids to serve adults’ political purposes.”
On Trump’s first day in office, the president signed an executive order that strips federal funding for any K–12 school or college that allows biological men to compete in women’s athletics. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) responded by updating its rules to ensure that only biological women can compete in such competitions. Several states with Democratic governors responded with lawsuits challenging the order.
Although the bill is nearly identical to the executive order, any executive order could be rescinded by a future administration. If the rules are codified into law, they can only be repealed through congressional action.
Last month, two committees of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) expressed their approval of Trump’s executive order that bans biological men from competing in women’s sports.
“We welcome the president’s executive order that protects opportunities for women and girls to compete in sports safely and fairly,” Diocese of Winona–Rochester, Minnesota, Bishop Robert Barron and Bishop David M. O’Connell of Trenton, New Jersey, said in a joint statement.
Barron is the chairman of the USCCB Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth, and O’Connell is the chairman of the Committee on Catholic Education.
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The Democrat dissenters merit a dressing down to get at the bottom of this!
Demonic!
TRANSGENDER IDEOLOGY’s ORIGIN?
What do you think of the idea that “transgender ideology” really began when Americans and Europeans began making all (or most) of their schools “coed” (mixing both sexes together in the same schools and classes)?
Some examples:
–Fordham University (a Catholic Jesuit university) in New York City. It was all-male until 1974. (It was all-male when Donald Trump was an undergraduate student there from 1966-1968.)
–Notre Dame University first admitted women/girls in 1972.
–Yale University first admitted women/girls in 1969.
–The University of Texas (state owned) first admitted women/girls in 1963.
Title IX — a 1972 federal law that prohibits discrimination based on a person’s “sex,” is essentially a pro-transgenderism law.
Underlying this whole “coed” movement was the essential ideology of transgenderism:
The idea that males and females were basically interchangeable human beings that can and should, as equals, compete against each other as neutral, independent units of production and innovation in the free market economy.
Coed=Transgender
The Communist Party-governed countries were the first to enforce comprehensive “coed” education and total equality of the sexes (in theory and in legal texts) in jobs. (The famous woman writer Ayn Rand got free undergraduate and graduate degrees in the Communist USSR in the 1920s due to this new feminist Communist policy. Miss Rand became pro-Capitalist, but she continued all her life to promote the Feminism and Atheism of the Communist Party.)
Following the Vatican II Council (1962-1965), Catholic lay culture in Western nations fully adopted the new secular norms of sex/gender equality.
Catholics discarded and soon forgot all about the traditional Catholic norms of women having the primary vocations of wife and mother, or religious sister.
It seems to most of us that the earthquake and insanity of woke transgender ideology began, like a bolt out of the blue, just 5 or 10 years ago.
But didn’t the earthquake and insanity of de facto transgender ideology really begin, in the Catholic culture, and in Western culture as a whole, in the late 1960s and early 1970s?
In 1995, Pope John Paul II approved girls as altar servers, some 10 or 15 years or so after U.S. bishops had already been allowing this on a widespread basis.
Don’t Feminism and Atheism go hand in hand? Don’t both distort and disfigure the form of God and Nature?
Do you think there is hope in this matter?
For God’s will to be realized, and for a return to sanity, do you think that we must go much further than banning males from competing against women in women’s sports (as important as that banning is)?
Maybe we Catholics can’t immediately (or ever) change the culture of non-Catholics.
But can’t we Catholics control our own Catholic culture? Can’t we set up walls and regulate who and what comes into our own cultural territory?
After all, we are the Body of Christ. We are the One, True Church. We are the only Church founded by Christ. As such, we Catholics have unique religious liberty granted to us by God.
Are we Catholics obligated to obsequiously conform our Catholic culture to the culture that that is dictated by the U.S. Congress, the U.S. President, the U.S. Supreme Court, the NCAA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Hollywood, Notre Dame University, or the United Nations?