As one of the first legislative acts of its new term, the House of Representatives has passed a sports ban on transgender women and girls. The legislation is not only limited to trans athletes—it seeks to amend constitutional protections for all trans, nonbinary and gender nonconforming students.
On Tuesday, the House voted on the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025, introduced by Rep Greg Steube of Florida. The bill passed 218-206. Two Texas Democrats—Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar—voted in favor with Republicans. Democratic Rep Don Davis of North Carolina voted “present.”
If it becomes law, the bill would pull funding from all public schools (from K-12 to higher education) for allowing trans female athletes to participate on women’s sports teams. In order to do so, the bill would amend Title IX, the 1972 federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools.
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In 2024, the Biden administration introduced new guidance on Title IX ensuring gender identity and sexual orientation are included under the definition of sex. The new bill seeks to restrict that definition to “biological sex,” though it does not define what exactly that means.
A similar bill has been introduced into the Senate by Tommy Tuberville of Alabama. While a vote is not yet scheduled, Republicans would have the numbers to pass it unless Democrats choose to filibuster the bill.
Democratic Rep Lori Trahan of Massachusetts raised the alarm on the dangerous implications of the bill for all women and girls. “Girls as young as four years old, being subjected to invasive lines of questioning about their bodies, and even physical inspections by an adult stranger, a predator, all because some creep accuses them of not being a girl?” she said.
Similar laws passed at the state level have already led to invasive investigations. In Florida, one trans student (“Elizabeth”) was the subject of a 500+ page report, which included police officers asking students about her naked body.
“The officers had spent considerable time trying to find out what Elizabeth looked like,” the Washington Post wrote. “They asked a district administrator to comb Elizabeth’s files and tell them how much she weighed every year between 2013 and 2017. They pushed multiple adults to describe her physically, and they asked three girls on the volleyball team if they’d ever seen Elizabeth undressed.”
Over 400 human rights groups have signed an open letter in opposition to the legislation. “Although the authors of the legislation represent themselves as serving the interests of cisgender girls and women, this legislation does not address the longstanding barriers all girls and women have faced in their pursuit of athletics,” the letter reads.
“Instead of providing for equal facilities, equipment, and travel, or any other strategy that women athletes have been pushing for for decades, the bill cynically veils an attack on transgender people as a question of athletics policy.”
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