WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives passed a bill Tuesday banning transgender students from federally funded school and university sports, but its prospects in the Senate appeared dim.
The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 would amend Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 by recognizing only sex assigned at birth when determining eligibility for participation in women’s sports.
Title IX is the federal civil rights law that prohibits gender discrimination in “any education program or activity” receiving federal assistance.
No Democratic senator has publicly expressed support for the bill. For it to pass, seven Democrats would have to join all Republicans.
The Senate stalled on a similar 2023 bill that passed the House along partisan lines.
In the House, two Democrats joined Republicans to pass the bill 218-206. The bill marked the latest in a years-long series of conservative attacks on transgender rights.
The legislation would give the federal government authority to prohibit trans girls and women from playing on girls’ and women’s athletic teams. Currently, states decide and more than half ban trans girls and women from playing on girls’ and women’s athletic teams that benefit from public funding.
“We know from Scripture, and from nature, that men are men and women are women, and men cannot become women,” Speaker Johnson said in a press conference following the vote.
Major medical associations differentiate gender from the sex assigned at birth. They support that an individual’s gender is determined based on how an individual identifies themselves.
However, Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) introduced the bill Jan. 3, saying on the House floor Tuesday that it restores the “integrity of women’s sports” and aligns with both biblical and biological understandings of gender.
“Our culture is subject to the perverse lie that men can be women or women can be men,” he said. “The distinction is clear, and this has been promulgated by those who seek to dismantle core society.”
The bill directs the comptroller general to launch a study into the “benefits to women or girls of participating in single sex sports that would be lost by allowing males to participate.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said the bill would open the floodgates to allowing children to be exploited due to unclear guidelines on how schools would determine who qualifies for girls and women’s teams.
“The majority right now says there’s no place in this bill that says it opens up for genital examinations,” she said on the House floor. “Well, here’s the thing. There’s no enforcement mechanism in this bill, and when there is no enforcement mechanism, you open the door to every enforcement mechanism.”
Congressional Equality Caucus Chair Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) said in a statement that Republicans prioritized their “obsession with attacking trans people” over grocery prices and school funding.
“It’s shameful that one of the first bills to pass the House this Congress limits transgender girls’ ability to be a part of their school’s community, prevents kids from playing with their friends and could force any girl to answer invasive personal questions about their bodies and face humiliating physical inspections to ‘prove’ that they’re a girl,” Takano said.
