Many House Democrats hoped they could show their commitment to protecting the LGBTQ+ community through a vote Tuesday on a sports bill targeting trans athletes. While most of the caucus voted no, two House Democrats sided with Republicans to back the bill.
The legislation — Rep. Greg Steube’s Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act — was the first test of whether Democrats will change course after many of them were silent on Republican attacks on trans people ahead of the 2024 election. Democrats had predicted that a majority of the caucus would oppose the bill, which they unanimously voted against in 2023. (Ten Democrats did not vote at the time.)
“We’re going to use every tool that we have to make sure that we’re fighting for the rights of LGBTQ. We didn’t do a good enough job during the election season conveying our message that we’re in this fight for them,” Rep. Lori Trahan, a member of House Democratic leadership, told NOTUS ahead of the vote.
But privately, some Democrats expressed doubts their caucus would stay unified. One House Democrat told NOTUS on Monday night that the situation was “a little shaky.”
Ultimately, two Democrats — Reps. Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar — voted with Republicans. Rep. Don Davis voted present.
“I’ve always been very clear that I’m against boys in girls’ bathrooms and biological males playing in female sports,” Gonzalez told NOTUS on Tuesday morning. He did not vote on the bill in 2023.
He added that “the bill is very broad, and I think that, hopefully, if it were to go to the Senate, it would get fixed and people would add more language to it, more guardrails. But just the general premise that biological boys play in girls’ sports, I disagree with that.”
Davis told NOTUS that he voted present because the issue “can best be resolved at the state level.”
“This is a topic which many have expressed concerns about,” he added. “If we’re going to move to some sort of federal legislation, I believe we need to engage a lot more with our local, states, local governments, as well as conferences. I just don’t think that bill today was totally, you know, the bill.”
Democrats have been grappling with the heavy scrutiny over their handling of anti-trans policies, which have become a key part of the GOP platform. President-elect Donald Trump has said that stopping “transgender lunacy” and keeping “men out of women’s sports” is a priority for his administration.
House Republicans followed his lead and placed the bill on trans athletes as a top priority for the 119th Congress. It would amend Title IX by banning federally funded colleges and schools from allowing trans women and girls to participate in any “athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls.”
House Democratic leadership whipped against the bill. In a notice sent to congressional offices Friday, House Minority Whip Katherine Clark’s office said, “Democrats are urged to VOTE NO.”
“While transgender youth are a small percentage of the youth population overall and already experience significantly more harassment and discrimination than their peers, House Republicans want to further ostracize trans youth by denying them the positive social and physical benefits of participating with school-based sports teams,” read the memo, which was viewed by NOTUS.
Last week, Rep. Mark Takano, the new chair for the Congressional Equality Caucus, told NOTUS he was “hopeful that the same outcome will happen this time around” as in 2023, when Democrats unified against the bill.
Rep. Robert Garcia echoed that statement. He said the bill “harms young girls and women. I think that you’re going to see a vast majority of the caucus — I hope as many as possible — vote no on this.”
But the discussion around trans rights among Democrats has been complicated since the election.
Following the election, Reps. Seth Moulton and Tom Suozzi made headlines for becoming the first House Democrats to publicly express concern about trans female athletes. Since then, other Democrats have followed suit in struggling to talk about trans rights.
Both Moulton and Suozzi voted against the bill, but Suozzi told NOTUS last week that it was a “very complicated issue and just to have it, you know, ‘my way or the highway’ and just ram it down people’s throats is going to result in people not supporting bills like this.”
Takano told NOTUS that he thinks there are “some serious questions about the fairness of trans athletes” in girls’ and women’s sports. However, he added that Democrats should have opposed Steube’s bill, even if they have concerns over “fairness,” because it “overreaches.”
“We don’t need the government’s heavy hand everywhere. We can settle issues of eligibility, sports participation eligibility in spaces like the [National Collegiate Athletic Association] and interscholastic and intercollegiate organizations and individual sports organizations,” Takano said.
The actual number of trans athletes is very small. There is no official count of how many trans athletes there are in schools, but NCAA President Charlie Baker said in a Senate hearing in December that of the 510,000 NCAA athletes, “less than 10” are trans.
A 2019 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that an average of 1.8% of high school students are transgender and a report from the Human Rights Campaign found that 14% of trans boys and 12% of trans girls play sports.
That hasn’t stopped Republicans from targeting these athletes.
Steube said in a press release earlier this month he reintroduced his bill this session because “Americans have loudly spoken that they do not want men stealing sports records from women, entering their daughters’ locker rooms, replacing female athletes on teams, and taking their daughters’ scholarship opportunities.”
Senators who back the companion bill have made similar arguments.
“This bill would make girls’ sports safe for girls again, and I’m going to do everything in my power to help it pass Congress quickly,” said Sen. John Kennedy, who joined nearly 30 other Senate Republicans in introducing the bill in the Senate.
Half of U.S. states already have laws to ban trans students from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity — a rapid increase since Idaho enacted the first ban in 2020.
Some trans activists said Democrats are finally entering the debate far too late. Charlotte Clymer, a Democratic strategist and trans activist, told NOTUS Democrats failed to address the issue as these bans were expanding and they “lost” the battle “a while ago.”
“We are here because the issue was ignored years ago, and now we’re seeing the price that we pay,” Clymer said.
Clymer added that most Americans are “getting the message, overwhelmingly from right-wing propagandists, that your little girls are going to get the shit beat out of them by trans girls. That’s not true. … And because Democrats have been too chicken shit to fight this issue over the last several years, we are now at the end of the line, and there’s no time left, none. We don’t have any bandwidth to fight on this anymore.”
She said that she would like Democrats to “focus on things like gender-affirming care, trans folks, the military, trans homelessness — issues that are life and death.”
Still, some Democrats in Congress consider this bill crucial to send a message to the upcoming GOP trifecta.
Rep. Mark Pocan, former chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, told NOTUS that while the bill isn’t new, it was important for Democrats to oppose this bill because of the upcoming GOP trifecta in Washington.
“I do think that the fact that [Republicans] will now have the House and the Senate and the White House, any bill like this has to have us pay a little more attention to because it’s not just an exercise in pleasing the base. In this case, it could also be real,” Pocan said.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that the vote on the bill “absolutely” represented an opportunity for Democrats to demonstrate they stand with trans people.
“The LGBT community and also women in general … deserve, in general, people to defend their rights,” she told NOTUS. “I don’t think that we should be buckling on our commitment to the rights of everyday Americans in the face of Trumpism. Now more than ever, these are the people that need us there for them.”
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Oriana González is a reporter at NOTUS. Katherine Swartz, a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed reporting.