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President-elect Donald Trump and his allies have made clear — including through stated policy positions and chosen campaign surrogates — that his administration intends to bar trans athletes from playing on school sports teams that match their gender identity.
“The president bans it,” Trump said at a Fox News event in Georgia last month. “You just don’t let it happen. Not a big deal.”
Trump and other Republicans have primarily threatened the participation of trans girls in K-12 sports programs, though college athletes wouldn’t be immune from any action Trump decides to take.
Trump’s threats raise the question: Could he challenge trans athletes’ right to compete in school sports?
How would Trump enact such a ban?
The short answer is yes. Trump could strip away civil rights and nondiscrimination protections enumerated under the Biden administration, which specifically apply to trans students.
The executive branch has a lot of control over what counts as discrimination in education, thanks to Title IX, a civil rights law originally meant to advance women’s equality. The Biden administration took the position that the law’s protections against discrimination “on the basis of sex” mean that discrimination against trans students on the basis of their trans identity qualifies as sex discrimination.
That interpretation of the law faced legal challenges and has been rejected by about half of the states. The Trump administration can — and likely will — simply take the stance that Title IX offers no protections to trans students.
The Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IX could go even further by arguing that “it is discriminatory against girls to have trans athletes participating in girls’ sports,” according to Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.
There could be new legal battles over Title IX if Democratic governors and attorneys general moved to stop the new interpretation — essentially the reverse of the current Title IX landscape.
Ultimately, the administration could go through Congress and try to rewrite Title IX, explicitly stating those positions rather than merely interpreting the current law that way, Valant said. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) already proposed a law in July undoing the Biden-era regulations. Trump has also said he will ask Congress to pass a bill stating that only two genders exist.
Republicans will hold narrow majorities in both the House and the Senate. It’s possible that such a bill could pass, though it would likely face some difficulty in the Senate, where Republicans lack a filibuster-proof majority.
Outside of federal action, some states like Florida already have bans against transgender students participating in school sports. Under that law, only people assigned female at birth can play on girls’ sports teams.
These kinds of laws could be stepping stones in dismantling trans people’s right to nondiscrimination in schools and the workplace, as well as their ability to access health care, Gillian Branstetter, communications strategist at the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and LGBTQ & HIV Project, told Vox.
“I can’t think of a single state or politician that has adopted this issue that has decided that they’re just going to narrowly focus on the rights of transgender athletes,” Branstetter said. “They have, using the exact same legal arguments, using the exact same legislative language, and usually using the exact same lawyers, also used these [tactics] to ban gender-affirming health care, to restrict what bathrooms trans people can use, and a long litany of other restrictions.”
