Protection Racket
The Right Wing wants women injured and miserable.
The Republican-dominated US House of Representatives passed the horribly misnamed “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025” this week. The bill, which has not as yet passed the Senate, prohibits any recipient of federal funds to allow ‘males’ to play on women’s sports teams at schools that receive federal funding. (This means almost all public grade schools and colleges in the US.) The law restricts ‘sex’ to the “person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth,” so no one who has or is in the process of gender transition can play on a women’s team. H.R. 28 -- 119th Congress also requires the Comptroller general to commission a “study shall document the adverse psychological, developmental, participatory, and sociological results to girls of allowing males to compete, be members of a sports team, or participants in athletic programs, that are designed for girls, including displacement or discouragement from sports participation . . .” Note that the language of the bill itself requires the Comptroller to document ADVERSE effects, which means the Act already assumes there will be adverse effects. There is no indication of what happens if there aren’t any adverse effects.1
Conservatives only recently discovered they cared about women’s sports. In fact, as recently as 2021, conservative Catholic writer Anthony Esolen gave the standard conservative opinion about women's sports:
To be clear, I am saying that women’s professional basketball—and women’s professional sports in general— definitely does not contribute to the common good. The real expense of it comes long before the WNBA with the expense for girls and women at the more than 100,000 schools and colleges in the country. This cost is borne by the taxpayer and by the families of college students. Suppose we said that colleges should only finance those sports that are financially self-sufficient, or those that help to forge a strong bond between the school and the community, which cost relatively little, and exact no unreasonable burden on the rest of the students. A few female sports would make the cut, and that’s fine with me. Male sports, on the other hand, would flourish. Many more men than women want to play sports to begin with, even if it means self-coaching, self-organization, self-financing, and no scholarships.
Conservatives generally disliked women’s sports existing, and took every opportunity to note that women just weren't very good at playing sports. In fact, Pope Pius XI deplored public athletic competitions for women. The American Conservative thought that the US Women’s National Soccer Team wasn’t even playing the same sport as the men’s team. So, why are Republicans in Congress so interested in keeping trans girls from playing on women’s school teams? What are they protecting women from?
Very few people, actually. There just aren't very many trans women playing school sports. The Newsweek article is from 2023 and quotes an expert estimating that there were 100 or less trans women playing school sports in both high school and college in the entire nation. As of November, 2024, there were 3.4 million girls playing high school sports in the US. The latest figures I can find for the NCAA are from 2022: 226,212 women on NCAA teams. So, unless we are really bad at counting, that’s about 100 trans athletes out of a little less than 4 million women athletes. This does not look like a real problem to me, but I’m not a Republican.
What are those transwomen that requires cis women to be ‘protected’ from them? Are transwomen more likely to assault cis women? They are not. The most likely person to assault a cis woman remains a cis male. A 2013 study by the United Nations found that 95% of all convicted murderers were male and that, while the majority of victims were male — mostly because of gang-related violence — the majority of women victims were murdered by a male family member. That is, male murder victims were likely to have been doing something really risky while female victims were simply existing in a family.
Confining the question to sports, the most likely person to harm a woman athlete is male coach or doctor. No one has ever suggested that women’s sports exclude male coaches, doctors, or officials. Men are quite welcome on women’s teams so long as they’re in positions of authority over the athletes.
It should be noted here that the biggest scandal in women’s sports involved a cis male authority figure in USA Gymnastics, which has its own Wikipedia entry. The center of this scandal was Larry Nasser, former team doctor and now convicted felon serving an extremely long sentence for abusing his patients. Nasser got away with raping the young women he was supposed to treat for TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. Nasser is a straight, cis male. What did conservatives say about Nasser? John Derbyshire, formerly of National Review, would have punished Nasser with 5 - 10 years entirely. Derbyshire blamed Nasser’s crimes on:
My question: Nassar was doing the stuff he was doing for twenty-five years. How'd he get away with it for so long?
Part of the answer, I'm sure, is the same as the answer to the same question in the matter of show business sexual harassment. In both cases there was a thing that the harassees wanted very, very badly —so badly that they, or in the case of younger victims, more likely their parents—might have considered that submitting to harassment or molestation was a price worth paying for that thing.
In the showbiz cases the thing wanted was a movie part; in Nassar's case, a shot at competing in the Olympics.
I don't say that's the whole story, and I certainly wouldn't say that all the victims took that cynical view. Twenty-five years of silence needs explaining, though. I've no doubt that's part of the explanation.
Larry Nasser’s crimes prompted the adoption of the Safe Sport Authorization Act of 2017. That law established the US Center for SafeSport, which maintains the Centralized Disciplinary Database of offenders disciplined for abuse in sports. Congress had already taken measures to address abusers involved in organized sports.2
Are transwomen actual dominating women’s sports? In fact, the most famous example of a transwoman in women’s sports is Lia Thomas, who beat Riley Gaines for a 5th place finish in an NCAA swim meet. Gaines basically lost a participation trophy. The small number of trans women athletes means that the overwhelming majority of awards to women in athletics will go to cis women. What makes this so serious?
The answer is that this is not about athletics at all. What this fake issue allows the Republicans to do is emphasize women’s weakness and need for ‘protection’ as stated in the bill’s misleading title. As I noted above, men are welcome on women’s teams as coaches, trainers, doctors, and officials, even though cis males pose an astronomically greater threat to women than trans women do. What those males do, however, is hold authority over the women. They reinforce hierarchy and the fable that women are weak and need protection. This is similar to Jim Crow laws, which allowed Black people into contact with white people only in positions of inferiority. A Black woman could be a maid to a white family, where she would get to use the toilet in the house, but couldn’t eat at the same restaurant or use the toilet in public.
This bill will do nothing to really protect women from actual predators. As I have shown, trans women don’t threaten cis women anywhere but in conservative fundraising letters.3 Conservatives ginned up this threat because they need women to believe we’re in all ways inferior to men. Conservatives are biological essentialists. We are nothing but our chromosomes.4 There is no need to change any social system to make it more just and fair if human ability is set entirely by genes.
Conservatives need women to accept that we are genetically doomed to be weak, stupid, and cowardly. We NEED ‘protection’ from men against things men determine threaten us. We are actually too stupid to decide for ourselves what is dangerous and what isn’t. Women are inferior to men in all ways and men are the only ones who should hold any position of authority. In the Esolen essay I quoted at the beginning of this piece, he flatly states that civilization depends on men working in teams. He reworked that essay into a piece for Crisis Magazine containing this quote:
What the woman seeks from the man is not what the man seeks from the woman, though these desired things complete one another, like a lock and a key. They are inscribed upon our bodies. The woman has the chin and the voice of the child. They say, “This person must be protected.” Her wide hips and her prominent breasts say, “This person is the garden of fertility, and you are utterly barren without her.”
Conservatives need women to cower so that we will submit to males. A woman who has confidence, especially physical confidence, won’t defer to someone just because he has a penis. Men won’t have to change their behavior to appeal to what we want, they can simply exist. Men organize teams with each other and then use those teams to acquire women without caring anything about the women’s own opinions. It is impossible to make men appreciate women for anything but our reproductive capacity since everything about a person is decided the minute the zygote forms from the two germ cells.
Conservatives believe in an unjust and unalterable hierarchy. Women in sports at all disrupts that hierarchy. Transgender people disrupt that hierarchy even more, by demonstrating in their bodies that we are not the helpless puppets of our chromosomes. Trans women playing organized sports and then failing to dominate those sports demonstrates more clearly than anything else that biology is NOT destiny. This is the REAL threat that conservatives are ‘protecting’ women from: the knowledge that we aren’t doomed to be idiots.
The only two Democrats who voted for this monstrosity are from Texas, Vicente Gonzalez TX - 34, based in McAllen, and aggressive and awful DINO Henry Cuellar of TX — 28, Laredo. Primary their worthless asses.
I should note that there have been many scandals involving male athletes assaulting and abusing women. Recent examples: Brock Turner. Baylor University, NFL players. Congress has not seen fit to pass laws banning males from joining sports teams.
A 2011 study in Sweden gets quoted a lot in conservative media as proving that trans women are likely to be rapists. According to the author of the study herself, this assertion is not at all true. The linked article contains an excellent summary of the study’s actual findings.
The relationship between sexism and racism is really apparent here. The pseudoscience of ‘race and intelligence’ depends on the idea that nothing in the environment can make someone doomed by genes to stupidity smarter. The Wikipedia entry I link to there has a good discussion of the flaws in their argument — basically that it’s impossible to determine someone’s SAT scores from a blood test. If a person believes that skin color and eye shape determine a person’s ability to understand Shakespeare or computer code, it is much easier for that person to believe the Y chromosome determines who should be President.