Democrats block bill to bar transgender girls from female sports teams

WASHINGTON – Democrats on Monday blocked a Republican-written bill aimed at barring transgender women and girls from school sports teams designated for female students, thwarting consideration in the Senate of the GOP’s latest move to use transgender people as leverage at the dawn of President Donald Trump’s second term.

With Democrats opposed, the measure stalled on a vote of 51-45, falling short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster and be brought up for consideration. The bill, which passed the House in January on a largely party-line vote, would prohibit federal funding from going to K-12 schools that include transgender students in women’s and girls’ athletic programs.

It mirrors one of the goals of an executive order Trump signed last month titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which charged the Education Department with changing its interpretation of civil rights laws so that schools that failed to bar transgender athletes could lose federal funding.

Senate Republicans argued it was essential to protecting girls from predatory men encroaching on their private spaces and seeking to gain an unfair athletic advantage on the basis of sex, even as they hinted that the measure was intended to lay a political trap for Democrats.

“Democrats can stand for women or stand with a radical transgender ideology,” Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the majority leader, said Monday. If they opposed the legislation, he said, “they’ll have to answer to the women and girls they vote to disenfranchise.”

Democrats denounced the legislation as a craven effort by Republicans to wring political advantage from a small but vulnerable population of transgender children that would ultimately put at risk the girls it purported to protect.

“What Republicans are doing today is inventing a problem to stir up a culture war and divide people against each other and distract people from what they’re actually doing,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii. He called the bill “totally irrelevant to 99.9% of all people across the country.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.