Not bringing down the cost of groceries or making housing more affordable, or even giving tax cuts to the rich. The first priority in the rules package House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., unveiled last week was banning trans people from sports.
The bill, which will be heard in the House now that the rules package has passed, seeks to define sex under Title IX for sports participation as defined at birth. This follows a yearslong moral panic over a small handful of trans athletes who found mostly middling success at lower levels of competitive collegiate athletics. An obsession with trans athletes has fully consumed right-wing media over the last few years, and state-level Republicans have found vast success by using trans participation in sports as a wedge issue.
The first priority in the rules package House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., unveiled last week was banning trans people from sports.
Last month, NCAA President Charlie Baker, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, stated that out of the roughly 500,000 women athletes currently taking part in intercollegiate athletics, he knows of “about 10” trans women.So why are Republicans so obsessively focused on getting trans women out of sports when there are almost no trans women in sports? Given that a recent poll shows public support for a ban on trans women in women’s sports at 66%, Johnson obviously sees the issue as a slam dunk. By making this the first vote newly elected Democrats have to make, he can reinforce the Trump campaign attack ads that accused Democrats of caring more about trans people than the average working family, even though the vast majority of trans people are working-class.
But making Democrats look bad by defending trans women — or look bad by not defending trans women — isn’t Republicans’ goal here. The goal of targeting trans women’s participation in sports is to create a federal law that declares trans women are men.
Once that precedent is established, then the laws can become more restrictive until it’s no longer legally viable to exist as a trans person under federal law.That has always been the project for conservatives. The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles said it at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2023, and the road map for accomplishing it politically was first made by the Family Research Council, a powerful religious lobby group, in 2015, even before the first bathroom bill panic set in. And now here we are, with Speaker Johnson committing to taking a big step in federal law.
I would say the first step in federal law, but Democrats and President Joe Biden already beat him to the punch in passing and signing the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which included a rider to block trans children of those in the armed forces from receiving the international medical standard of gender-affirming care — the first anti-LGBTQ federal law enacted since the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. Throughout the campaign season, Republicans pilloried Democrats over trans rights Johnson and the rest of the House GOP’s taking their first votes as newly elected representatives to ban the 10 or so trans athletes competing in college sports and the couple of handfuls playing high school sports, rather than securing the border that they falsely describe as “open” or cutting the cost of living or doing anything about the economy, is telling.Throughout the campaign season, Republicans pilloried Democrats over trans rights, accusing them of putting trans people over everyone else. But it’s Republicans who are clearly obsessed with trans people. It’s Republicans who are putting the persecution of a couple of dozen trans young people before — and above — the needs of the working class or even national security. I understand that some Democrats want to join Republicans in indulging at least a little legislative transphobia, as has been made clear recently by Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York and Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, but there’s another path for liberals. Explain to voters just how deep the GOP obsession with trans people runs; make an argument that counters conservative messaging. People like it when politicians stand up for their principles, and if Democrats really believe in a free country for even the most marginalized among us, then they should plant their feet and fight it out.I’d at least respect that compared to the trans blame game many of them have been playing since Election Day. It’s easy to try to put the trans athlete question in its own silo and to convince yourself as a Democrat that you can be pro-trans and also agree to ban trans women from women’s sports. But in doing so, you open the door to further attacks on more critical trans rights down the road that would use the trans athlete precedent to whittle away our rights in another area, like health care or bathroom access.
Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist based in New England. 
