Depending on the polling you’re looking at, Republicans in Pennsylvania’s state Senate are about to try again to limit transgender athletes in school sports. This measure is expected to encounter more obstacles than the previous one, but it might be a political wedge issue.
This week marked the official start of Pennsylvania’s legislative session for the 2025–2026 term, and Harrisburg saw the introduction of a deluge of bill memos. A memo signed by all of the female Senate GOP members announcing the plan to reintroduce a bill named the Save Women’s Sports Act stood out among them due to the sheer number of co-sponsors.
The bill, which was first proposed during the 2021–22 legislative session, would provide people the legal right to sue K–12 educational institutions, colleges, and universities for permitting transgender women and girls to participate in female sports.
According to previous bills, Pennsylvanian educational institutions are prohibited from allowing male students to participate in sports intended for female students. The definition of sex is based on genetic makeup and reproductive biology.
The draft text for the 2021–22 session provides clear grounds for a civil complaint against students who feel they have been harmed by an alleged infringement of this regulation.
The senators stated in this week’s memo that it is crucial that we safeguard female athletes’ right to fair and equal competition on the sporting field. All women are automatically at a disadvantage when a biological guy is permitted to play on a women’s scholastic sporting team.
The Senate bill’s wording is the same as a House bill that was vetoed by Democratic Governor Tom Wolf two sessions ago after passing both chambers of the state legislature with Republican majorities. The measures’ wording is likewise similar to that of certain conservative school boards that have aimed to restrict trans athletes’ participation.
The law does not outline the precise reproductive biology and genetic requirements that should be set, nor does it explain how school districts might protect themselves from legal danger. In other instances, conservative school boards have attempted to control what chromosomes athletes can possess by taking the latter term at face value.
The ambiguous wording is intentional, according to LGBTQ advocacy groups that have opposed the legislation. They see the bills as an effort to scare school officials into not providing any accommodations for transgender students out of concern for legal action.
Advocates claim that such actions are closely related to efforts to police classroom speech about pronouns and other LGBTQ matters, as well as to limit gender-transition health care, such as the Tennessee statute whose appeal was addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday.
According to Jason Landau Goodman, a lawyer and board chair of the Pennsylvania adolescents Congress, an advocacy organization for young LGBTQ people, these measures are entirely focused on delegitimizing the dignity of trans adolescents and have nothing to do with women’s sports.
Goodman went on to say that the anti-trans sports ban laws they draft are ambiguous and unenforceable, raising concerns about whether legislators really want schools to take kids’ blood for genetic testing or check their genitalia before letting them participate in sports.
There are many ambiguities in the problem and the politics around it. The administration of President Barack Obama took action in 2013 to interpret Title IX, which governs gender equality and applies to all schools that receive federal financing, to include protection for LGBTQ students.
President Joe Biden restored these regulations after Donald Trump attempted to repeal them during his first term in office. Notably, the Biden administration also suggested a Title IX rule that would have made it illegal to reject transgender student-athletes outright. Instead, it suggested that institutions consider each case individually, taking into account variables like injury risk, competition level, and other comparable considerations.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to the advantages that transgender athletes may or may not have, and the controversies surrounding male-to-female transgender athletes competing in elite college competitions are a significantly different issue than K–12 students who wish to participate in recreational sports, as Biden’s proposed rule reflected.
However, the sports-specific Title IX rule is not anticipated to be finalized by the Biden administration. Amid Republican assaults and Democratic worries that a nuanced approach to the subject was politically impossible, the White House mostly stopped discussing the matter, as Vox reported earlier this year. In any case, it is highly likely that Trump will revoke Biden’s Title IX provisions in his second term.
According to some advocates, such as the Education Law Center, prohibitions of transgender student-athletes would be prohibited under the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act if they were challenged. The Act forbids sex-based discrimination in public services.
Furthermore, according to current regulations from the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA), which oversees public K–12 school athletics, the administrator of each particular school will have the last say in any disputes regarding a student’s gender.
Over the past ten years, numerous institutional sporting associations have been putting into practice inclusion standards that are grounded in responsible public policy and science, according to Goodman. In this context, strict, general regulations are ineffective unless your true goal is to exclude transgender students from society.
A significant majority of Americans, according to polls from Gallup, the Washington Post, and other sources, oppose discrimination against transgender persons, but they are also against letting trans athletes participate in sports that don’t correspond with their biological gender.
Republicans have mostly capitalized on voters’ distrust; throughout the 2024 campaign trail, Trump frequently attacked men in women’s sports, and his campaign committees spent millions on attack ads claiming Democrats of adopting extreme stances on the matter.
Blueprint exit polling reveals that even when the attack commercials included blatantly inaccurate descriptions of his opponents’ ideas, a sizable proportion of swing voters who chose Trump believed them.
However, the extent to which this influenced their votes is unknown. Voters’ lists of priorities consistently put LGBTQ rights, and transgender problems in particular, low, with the economy having a far greater influence.
Additionally, according to some surveys, the majority of voters are just pessimistic about the situation and think it is being exaggerated.
According to a Data for Progress survey, a slight majority of respondents agreed that attack advertising pertaining to trans rights issues had become mean-spirited and out of control, and four out of five people felt that both parties were spending too much time on transgender matters. According to a LA Times survey, 77% of Americans think politicians are using transgender issues as a diversion from more pressing topics.
According to Goodman, there are likely more lawmakers in the General Assembly who are in favor of these legislation than there are transgender youth in Pennsylvania who have been playing school sports.
On January 7, the Pennsylvania House and Senate are expected to return to Harrisburg.
More politics & policy coverage from Zack Hoopes
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