GOP senators said legislation barring transgender females from participating in women’s sports will receive floor consideration next year if Republicans retake the Senate in November.
Sens. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Katie Britt (R-AL), and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) individually expressed confidence on Tuesday that a Republican Senate majority leader would bring such legislation up for a vote. The three were speaking at a roundtable organized by Tuberville on Title IX, the landmark law that ensures equal athletic opportunities for women.
A patchwork of states and municipalities have enacted laws in recent years prohibiting participation in competitive sports that do not match the player’s biological sex. These have largely been partisan efforts backed almost exclusively by Republican legislators. The Biden administration, meanwhile, has been trying to update Title IX regulations to increase protections for LGBT people.
In Congress, where Democrats control the Senate and Republicans control the House, such legislation has no path to passing both chambers. Even if a bill were to somehow reach President Joe Biden’s desk barring biological males from participating in female sports, there is no guarantee he would sign it.
The Senate is only split 51-49 in Democrats’ favor, meaning Republicans only need two wins in November to regain the majority.
“I think that there’s an opportunity to move forward in the next Congress. And I think there’s a chance also if we have a change in the presidency to move forward,” Lummis said, calling for the Senate to pass a women’s bill of rights focused on athletics. “I think we’re going to be in a better position to move forward in 2025, and we need to make it a top priority.”
“When it comes to our jobs, we are working diligently,” Britt said. “This will happen on a local level. This will happen on a state level and then you’ll see it happen here on the federal level.”
Britt, who is a member of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) leadership team, noted that there are “a number of different legislative actions” that Republicans are working on moving through the upper chamber, including Tuberville’s bill protecting women in sports and Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s (R-MS) effort to pass a broader women’s bill of rights.
“We may take back the Senate next year, [at which point] I have a feeling we’ll be able to move some of this forward,” she added. “And we’ll be able to also have hearings where we’re able to do this in a broader scale and ask these questions and bring light to them for the American people.”
Tuberville recognized that neither party had a path to reaching a 60-vote majority next year, which would allow one side to bypass the legislative filibuster. He cautioned as a result that even if Republicans were to regain control of the upper chamber, they will still need to peel off some Democrats to pass legislation on the issue of transgender participation in sports.
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“Elections have consequences. We have an election this year, and hopefully we can take the Senate, but in the Senate, you still have to get 60 votes,” he explained. “We won’t have 60, and so we’re going to have to plead with our cohorts on the Left to make a commonsense decision to save women’s sports.”
“If this doesn’t happen, if it continues to go the way it’s going, we will not have women’s sports,” he added.
