Trans sports ban: House passes bill barring transgender women from school sports
Illustration by Annika Hammel.
Max Walpole, Contributing Writer
The House of Representatives passed a bill, the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025, on Jan. 14. It would prohibit transgender women from participating in women’s sports at schools receiving federal funding. The bill would also change federal law to define sex as what reproductive organs a person is born with.
A second round of voting in the Senate, and the discretion of the president, will determine if the bill becomes law.
Maya Jones, a transgender LGBT studies and social welfare student, said they think the bill is not only discriminatory against transgender women, but that many cisgender women would not meet the narrow parameters for how a woman should look and behave based on the language and criteria of the bill.
“There are a lot of situations where people try to stick a specific type of biological presentation onto female athletes and oftentimes when it’s directed at transgender women, it’s also directed at just women of color,” Jones said.
Jones said if the bill became a law they have faith that the VCU community would rally behind the transgender female athletes barred from taking part in clubs and sporting events, but they do not expect VCU’s administration to do the same.
“I would love VCU to respond with every opportunity that they have to stand with their transgender athletes,” Jones said. “I don’t expect VCU to respond like that necessarily, especially the actual administration. I’m not confident in them standing with most of us if any of us are marginalized.”
Jones said they believe the core assumptions made by the authors of the bill about the behavior of transgender women do not reflect reality.
“I think there’s this rhetoric that trans women, because they were born male, that they have ‘male tendencies’ in the sense that they are ‘predators,’” Jones said. “So the rhetoric that transgender women shouldn’t be in sports for the safety of the, quote-unquote, ‘real women’ in sports, I believe that to be a falsehood.”
AC Swartz, a fourth-year biology student and the president of the VCU women’s basketball club, said she thought the bill was unneeded when it was first discussed, and was dismayed to see it pass the House. She said the bill is offensive to both transgender and female athletes.
“It kind of invalidates our experience as athletes by saying that it puts us at disadvantage playing against trans women because everyone puts in time, everyone puts in work,” Swartz said.
Ashlyn Jones, a rehabilitation engineering student and a member of the VCU women’s basketball club, said she doubted the bill was actually written for the benefit of cisgender female athletes.
“I don’t see how this is really an issue that there needs to be a law in place for it,” Jones said. “I feel like this is personal.”
K Cromartie, also a member of the VCU women’s basketball club, said they felt the bill is indicative of a wider trend of societal moral decay.
“I think a lot of people are taking things personal, and their personal morals, they want to put that into play against everybody else’s word, and that’s where we lose empathy,” Cromartie said.
Cromartie, who is nonbinary and has a higher testosterone level than most women, said their biology has no influence on their ability or skill either way.
“I don’t see an advantage in how I play compared to the other people that have a lower testosterone level,” Cromartie said.
A representative of the VCU Athletics Communications Department declined to comment on the bill, citing that it was too early to make any definitive statements.
