New York, NY; January 21, 2025—On Tuesday, January 14, the Republican-led House of Representatives passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 (H.R. 26) by a vote of 219 to 203. The bill amends Title IX to clarify that it is violated when a school “permits a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls.”
It then defines sex in the context of athletics, stating: “[S]ex shall be recognized based solely on a person's reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” It exempts practice and training so women and men’s teams can still scrimmage.
The bill now proceeds to the Senate.
“This vote is an important victory for sanity in the Title IX space,” said Teresa R. Manning, Director of Policy at the National Association of Scholars.
“Gender ideology was in the process of ruining women’s athletics as the repulsive spectacle at the Olympics showed, where a male boxer eliminated his female opponent in seconds,” Manning continued.
“Gender ideology also ruins basic rights such as women’s privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms. In short, gender ideology is ruinous chaos. Fortunately, the House vote on January 14 is an impressive first step by the United States Congress to halt this pathology in America.”
Most significant is the bill's forthright definition of sex. Notably, the language is that sex shall be “recognized”—not contrived, not claimed, not fabricated—but recognized as “based solely on a person's” biology and genetics at birth."
“This definition alone makes the bill worthy of support,” Manning explained, “as it begins the necessary restoration of common sense—the acknowledgment of a person's sex as a matter of reality, not politics and not ideology.”
“Unfortunately, federal law must now make explicit what everyone knows—that a person's sex cannot change no matter how many chemicals or clinical castrations are used. Today, the more laws and regulations—both federal and state—that explicitly recognize this reality, the better,” Manning concluded.
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