The War on Women's Sports
Sports make women "less deferential and less oriented toward motherhood and traditional female graces" says a new conservative proposal to functionally dismantle Title IX.
The overt right-wing assault on women’s and girls’ sports has begun, and you probably haven’t even heard about it.
Earlier this month, the Heritage Foundation released a report on Title IX, the federal law banning gender discrimination in education. Heritage is the organization behind Project 2025, the conservative agenda that has dictated much of what the Trump administration has done over the past two years. Their Title IX report is written by Scott Yenor, who has previously made the case that employers should be allowed to refuse to hire women in an effort to restore a nuclear family model of a male breadwinner with a stay-at-home wife (career women, Yenor has said, are “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome”).
Now, he’s taking on girls’ sports and the law that protects them — which he says should fundamentally change in order to advantage the “naturally” more competitive boys.
The purpose and value of women’s sports have always been politicized. But the topic is discussed more often now than at any point in my adult life because of questions raised by the participation of trans girls and women in women’s sports. I’ve seen right-wing misogynists transform themselves into staunch defenders of women’s rights so long as it means keeping trans people out of athletics. I’ve also seen self-styled feminists question whether we even need single-sex sports teams, argue against all evidence that there aren’t significant sex differences when it comes to athletics, or suggest that it’s simply not a big deal if the girls’ teams see some unfair competition (that this isn’t an issue on boys’ and men’s teams tells you something). Unfortunately, too many feminists have ceded the ideological defense of women’s sports to anti-trains conservatives.
I don’t mean that feminists have failed to defend women’s sports from trans women. I think the trans women in sports debate is complex and fair solutions vary significantly depending on the sport, the age of the participants, and the particulars of the participants. Whatever you think about the conversation around trans women in sports, though, you should be advocating for the fair treatment of women’s sports as a category, not questioning whether women’s sports should even exist. And if you’re a conservative who claims you want to defend women’s sports, well, now is your moment. Because the influential and far-right conservatives of the Heritage Foundation are coming — and they are planning to legislate women’s sports largely out of existence.
