Democrats on Monday blocked a Republican bill aimed at banning transgender women and girls from school sports teams designated for female students, and hampered consideration in the Senate, the latest move to leverage transgender people at the dawn of President Trump's second term.
As Democrats opposed, the measure stagnated with 51-45 votes, failing to reach the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster and nurture it for consideration. The bill would pass the House in January with a predominantly party-affiliated vote and prohibit sending federal funds to K-12 schools that include transgender students to women and girls athletic programs.
This reflects one of the goals of Trump's executive order, signed last month with the title “Turning Men out of Women's Sports,” and the education department accused them of altering their interpretation of civil rights laws so that schools that failed to ban transgender athletes could lose federal funds.
Senate Republicans argued that it was essential to seek girls to infiltrate private spaces and seek to gain unfair athletic advantages based on gender.
“Democrats can stand with women and with radical transgender ideology,” Sen. John Tune, a Republican and majority leader in South Dakota, said Monday. If they opposed the law, he said, “They will need to answer the women and girls who vote to deprive them of their rights.”
Democrats have condemned the law as an eerie effort by Republicans to narrow political advantage from the small population of transgender children who endanger girls who ultimately aim to protect them.
“What Republicans do today is to invent the issues of stirring up culture wars, scattering people around each other and distracting people from what people actually do,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat. He called the bill “it's completely unrelated to 99.9% of all people across the country.”
The measure was sponsored by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a Republican of Alabama, and former high school girls' basketball coach. On the Senate floor, GOP lawmakers cited a poll that says the majority of Americans, including most Democrats, should not be allowed to play women's sports.
Many Congressional Democrats agree that there is real concern that trans athletes compete in women's sports at the highest level. However, they argued that the Athletic Association should make these decisions. Lawmakers will not pass wide bills at the federal level, bringing together competitive athletes and young children who want to join school activities with friends.
Whether at K-12 school or college level, trans athletes have already banned trans athletes from participating in school sports.
On Monday, Senate Democrats argued that the law is not only an attack on basic human dignity, but also a waste of time. Of the more than 500,000 NCAA athletes, fewer than 10 were identified as transgender.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, also said the bill had no enforcement mechanism and “if someone on the opposing team accused of being transgender, women and girls can be exposed to physical examinations by adults.”
In the political wilderness, Congressional Democrats have very few levers to pull to get in the way of the Republican governance trilogy. But the filibuster remains one of the last ways to block laws that could otherwise go to Trump's desk for his signature.
Earlier this year, Senate Democrats blocked measures to force some doctors to submit to criminal penalties. They blocked the Republican bill and imposed sanctions on officials belonging to the International Criminal Court, who wanted to responsibly repent for the decision of top prosecutors to raise accusations of war crimes against top Israeli leaders for military attacks on Hamas in Gaza.
