What happened with the Protection of Women and Girls Act of 2025 yesterday?

January 15, 2025

Yesterday, in what can only be described as a cringe-fest, numerous House Democrats behaved like absolute lunatics in explaining their opposition to the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 during a House floor debate. After the debate, the bill passed nearly (but not entirely) along party lines. You can watch a recording of the debate here (though I don’t necessarily recommend it). Women’s Declaration International USA has issued a statement about the bill’s passage.

I wrote about why progressives should support the bill in 2023, when the House first voted to pass it (it later died in the Senate, thanks to then Majority Leader Charles Schumer):

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives is poised to take the historic step of passing the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023. The U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International, of which I serve as president, is proud to support the bill. [I declined to re-run for president of WDI USA in 2024.]

In the 1960s and 1970s, second-wave feminists, who leaned to the Left, fought hard for women’s rights. They opened rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters (run by women) for women fleeing male violence. They won many property rights for women, which allowed women to leave oppressive marriages. And they fought for abortion access.

There’s a very good reason why second-wave feminists had to fight for women’s rights: it was because women didn’t have those things before. And the reason women didn’t have those things before was because they were women. Today, all of that is being thrown out the window because of the absurd fallacy of “gender identity.”

One of feminists’ most stunning accomplishments was the enactment of Title IX, which was designed to end discrimination against women in the educational arena. Its implementing regulations permit the separation of the sexes under certain circumstances.

The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023 is a powerful piece of legislation that would bolster Title IX by explicitly protecting women and girls in athletics, and political progressives should support it. So why aren’t they?

Our society has been taught a vicious and unscientific lie: that some men can be women, and that some women can be men, on the basis of their “gender identity.” Democratic Party leadership, at the state and federal levels, is one of the greatest perpetrators of this lie.

Men aren’t women, even if they say they are, and even if they claim to “identify” as such. Women and girls (female humans) need separate spaces from men and boys (male humans) because of differing biology. There is no credible scientific evidence to support the proposition that a person born with a Y chromosome can be a woman. It should not be considered “conservative” or even remotely controversial to say so.

In this post, I’ll describe some of the more cringe-worthy moments of yesterday’s debate and offer some analysis of a few other interesting developments, including the newsworthy fact that two Democrats made history by becoming the first Democrats to vote to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls at the federal level.

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