The U.S. House of Representatives passed a floor vote to ban trans and intersex girls and women from participating in sports at federally funded schools and universities. A similar bill is also currently before the U.S. Senate.
While the 216-206 vote fell mostly along party lines, Texas Democrats Vicente Gonzalez of District 34 (located in the furthest south point of the state and including Corpus Christi) and Henry Cuellar of District 29 (which runs along the Texas/Mexico border at Laredo and stretches north to San Antonio) voted in favor of the bill. Democrat Don Davis of North Carolina voted “present.”
The vote drew quick and widespread condemnation from LGBTQ advocates.
Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of Advocates for Trans Equality, released a statement saying, “This discriminatory bill is an unconscionable attack on transgender girls and women across the country. Every child deserves a quality education, including the ability to participate in athletic programs. This bill is not motivated out of concern for women and girls in athletics, but animus toward a small group of vulnerable students.”
“This bill is not motivated out of concern for women and girls in athletics, but animus toward a small group of vulnerable students.”
Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of Advocates for Trans Equality
Heng-Lehtinen continued, “We know that school policy, whether made at the local, state or national level, has profound impacts on bullying and harassment of LGBTQI+ students.
“If this bill is signed into law, it makes every school less safe for transgender students and their peers. The American people have a laundry list of urgent matters impacting our families every day and our ability to put food on our tables and roofs over our heads, and these anti-trans politicians are ignoring the people’s business to take up the hateful agenda of right-wing extremists and target youth who just want to play sports with their friends.
“It is not the government’s role to replace parents and intervene in the lives of our young people. They should be instead focused on ensuring that every student, no matter who they are or where they live, can be safe and respected at school,” Heng-Lehtinen said. “This is an attack on Title IX. Extremist lawmakers emboldened by the incoming administration plan to systematically weaken civil rights protections for all Americans, and they are starting right now.”
U.S. Rep. Mark Takano, representing California’s 39th district and chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus — which has dubbed the bill the “Child Predator Empowerment Act” — issued a statement declaring, “Once again, Republicans have proved that their obsession with attacking trans people trumps lowering the cost of groceries or investing in our schools.
“It’s shameful that one of the first bills to pass the House this Congress limits transgender girls’ ability to be a part of their school’s community, prevents kids from playing with their friends, and could force any girl to answer invasive personal questions about their bodies and face humiliating physical inspections to ‘prove’ that they’re a girl,” Takano said, “Speaker Johnson and the Republican Conference are more focused on passing legislation that targets transgender children for exclusion and puts all girls at risk than working to address the problems impacting Americans daily.”
Openly lesbian Congresswoman Becca Balint of Vermont, speaking on the House floor, noted that she is a former teacher and the mother of two teenage girls. “I know what kids are going through in school,” she said. “They are already self-conscious about their bodies. They just want to be on the soccer field with their friends. They certainly do not want to be humiliated by members of Congress.
“We know there is only one logical conclusion to this. This is interrogation of young girls. About their bodies. This is asking people to show them what is underneath their underwear.”
Congresswoman Becca Balint of Vermont
“So, come on, let’s talk about what enforcement looks like, because you guys, you don’t want to talk about it,” Balint added. “We know there is only one logical conclusion to this. This is interrogation of young girls. About their bodies. This is asking people to show them what is underneath their underwear.”
Republicans, however, continued to insist their only concern is protecting children, with House Speaker Mike Johnson calling is a “common sense” bill aiming to “keep biological men out of women’s sports.” And he warned Democrats who voted against the measure that “The American people sent a clear message in November. They want a return to common sense, but Democrats are ignoring them.”
(The November election, by the way, was when the first transgender woman — Congresswoman Sarah McBride — was elected to the U.S. House.)
Republicans call the bill the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025,” and Republican Greg Steube of Florida carried the bill in the House.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, a longtime college football coach who single-handedly held up more than 400 military promotions in 2023 to protest the Defense Department policy of reimbursing service members who had to travel for reproductive care and who is commonly known as the dumbest person in the U.S. Senate — carries the bill in the upper chamber.
H.R. 28 amends existing law to make it a violation of Title IX for recipients of federal financial assistance to allow transgender girls or women to participate in girls’ and women’s athletic programs, effectively banning all trans girls and trans women from participating on school sports teams. It would also limit the ability of non-binary and intersex students to participate in these programs as well.