Thune says Senate will consider bill to restrict trans athletes 'early next week'

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) says legislation to prevent transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports will go to the Senate floor “early next week,” potentially fast-tracking a bill on an issue Republicans and President Trump made central to their campaigns.

The Republican-led House approved Rep. Greg Steube’s (R-Fla.) Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act in January with the help of two Texas Democrats. If the Senate, where Republicans also have the majority, votes to pass the bill, it will head to Trump’s desk, where it is almost certain to be signed into law.

“We’re going to put that on the floor early next week,” Thune said Thursday, appearing on the “Ruthless” podcast. “It’s an issue the House has voted on, and the president issued an executive order. What this would do is codify the executive order.”

Trump’s Feb. 5 executive order aims to bar transgender athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s sports nationwide and directs the Justice Department to take immediate action, including enforcement actions, against schools and athletic associations that allow trans student-athletes to participate in line with their gender identity.

Attorney General Pam Bondi warned officials in Maine, California and Minnesota this week to comply with Trump’s order, and the Education Department opened several investigations into states, school districts and athletic associations that have refused to enforce the restrictions.

The bill before the Senate next week seeks to amend Title IX, the federal civil rights law against sex discrimination, to prohibit schools from allowing transgender students to compete in athletic events “designated for women or girls.”

Similar to another Trump executive order, it defines sex as “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”

“It’s unfortunate that it’s something that needs to be codified, but we’re going to make sure that the president’s EO endures over time,” Thune said Thursday, the same day he scheduled a procedural vote on the bill for Monday evening.

“My assumption is we’ll get a lot of resistance, obviously, from the Democrats,” he added. “Clearly, there are partisan issues in our times and things that we deal with legislatively, which create sort of the deep political divide that we have, but this one, to me, it just seems like it’s common sense.”

The question of whether to restrict or ban trans athletes from girls’ and women’s sports has been a politically fraught one for Democrats, who were left surprisingly flat-footed by Republican campaign ads last cycle asserting they supported “men” in girls’ sports.

Some Democrats blamed the party’s November election losses on its support for transgender rights, though voters in most exit polls said issues related to the economy and immigration drove their decision at the ballot box.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that Americans have grown more supportive of policies restricting transgender rights, including ones that require athletes to compete on sports teams that match their birth sex.

The number of transgender students participating in school sports is unclear.

In September, the National Federation of State High School Associations, which does not report how many student-athletes are transgender, said more than 8 million students competed in high school sports last year. Karissa Niehoff, the organization’s CEO, told The Hill an openly trans athlete has never set a national record. 

Charlie Baker, president of the NCAA, which barred transgender athletes from competing in women’s college sports following Trump’s executive order, told a Senate panel in December that he is aware of fewer than 10 transgender NCAA athletes.

Opponents of policies that prevent trans athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s sports have said such restrictions will inevitably fuel speculation about whether female athletes, transgender or not, look feminine enough to compete in women’s sports without facing questions about their gender.

“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,” more than 400 civil rights groups, including Advocates for Trans Equality and the Human Rights Campaign, wrote last month in a letter to Congress.

“You can sit at your desk and sign a piece of paper and make trans people’s life far more difficult than necessary but you will NEVER erase us or our joy,” middle-distance runner Nikki Hiltz, who is trans and nonbinary, wrote in an Instagram story after Trump signed the executive order on trans athletes.