By They will never give up on the issue because it’s become an obsession on the left. Despite massive polling numbers showing their on the wrong side, Senate Democrats on Monday blocked a Republican-led bill that aimed to prohibit transgender women and girls from joining school sports teams designated for female students, effectively halting a key component of President Trump’s policy agenda in his second term. The bill, which required 60 votes to advance. After passing the House in January with largely partisan support, the legislation sought to withhold federal funding from K-12 schools that permitted transgender athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s sports.
A poll taken in February revealed that nearly 80 percent of the country opposed biological men playing in women’s sports.
The measure aligned with an executive order Trump signed last month, titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which instructed the Education Department to cut funding to schools that did not enforce a ban on transgender athletes. Senate Republicans defended the bill as a necessary safeguard for female athletes, citing concerns over fair competition and safety. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, argued that Democrats faced a choice between supporting women or endorsing what he called “radical transgender ideology,” suggesting that opposition to the bill would undermine female athletes.
The bill’s Republican backers needed at least seven Democrats to support a procedural vote on the legislation for it to advance to a final vote in the Senate but did not receive any. Although a majority of senators backed the legislation on a 51-45 vote, the proposal failed to reach the necessary three-fifths supermajority, according to reports.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, introduced the bill, dubbed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025. A similar bill narrowly passed the House of Representatives in late January with two Democrats joining the Republican majority in support of it.
The bill would have amended Title IX — a 1972 federal law that prohibits discrimination based on a person’s “sex.” It would have clarified that the word “sex” in Title IX’s section on athletics referred solely to a “person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth” — not a person’s self-professed gender identity.
Under the proposed language, biological men who identify as transgender women would be ineligible to compete in any athletics competition that is reserved for women.
Liberals dismissed the measure as a politically driven attempt to exploit transgender youth for partisan advantage, wrote The New York Times. Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, accused Republicans of manufacturing a controversy to fuel a culture war and divide the electorate. While the bill’s sponsor, Senator Tommy Tuberville, a Republican from Alabama, cited polling data showing broad public support for restrictions on transgender participation in women’s sports, Democrats pointed out that more than two dozen states had already implemented such bans, making federal intervention unnecessary. They also emphasized that transgender athletes comprise a tiny fraction of competitors, particularly at the collegiate level.
Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, expressed concerns about potential enforcement measures, warning that the bill could lead to invasive physical inspections of female athletes accused of being transgender. With Republicans in control of both the White House and Congress, Senate Democrats have limited means to block GOP-backed legislation, but the filibuster remains a powerful procedural tool. Earlier this year, Democrats used it to prevent the passage of other Republican measures, including a bill that would impose criminal penalties on doctors performing certain abortions and another sanctioning International Criminal Court officials investigating Israeli military actions in Gaza.
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