It is possible you did not hear the amazing news from March 1, when a new national record in the women’s high school triple jump was set. The new record was three full feet longer than the jump by the runner-up in that event, an astonishing feat by any measure. Astonishing, that is, unless you uncover that the new record holder is actually a biological male. And by the way, the male high school triple jump record is over a foot longer than this — here we have yet another case of an individual who would not have excelled at men’s sports but is positively crushing it in women’s sports.
So it might surprise you, then, that 45 senators — every single one of them a Democrat — voted two days later against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act that would make this type of outrageous farce illegal. (Four senators didn’t vote: Shelley Moore Capito, R-West Virginia.; Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyoming.; Elissa Slotkin, D-Michigan; and Peter Welch, D-Vermont).
One news source reported that, “Democrats dismissed (the bill) as a distraction and a cynical political move.” The argument, as articulated by Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, is that “It’s an infinitesimally small group of people that are really trying to find their ways ... (it’s) social wars about something that really doesn’t exist.” The implication is that this is a “fringe issue” about which no one really cares, and for which voters will not hold these senators accountable.
The senators, and by extension the Democratic Party, have made a grave miscalculation. First, the overwhelming majority of Americans believe this is unfair and wrong. A 2025 poll by The New York Times reveals that 79% of Americans do not believe males should be competing in women’s sports, no matter the gender with which they identify. (And only 18% said they should be allowed to compete.) In fact, the more Americans think about the subject, the more they oppose it; a similar poll in 2023 found 67% opposed. A jump of 12% in opposition over the course of less than two years is quite remarkable. Further, it is almost impossible to find any other subject on which almost 80% of Americans all agree in 2025; you just don’t see an 80/20 split on social issues today. Americans are strongly united on this issue.
It is, therefore, patently undemocratic for these 45 senators to vote against their constituencies when public opinion is crystal clear on the issue. This is not a hedge issue: American citizens have made their views well known. Across party lines, Americans view males competing in women’s sports as cheating; this is a true bipartisan consensus. Why, then, aren’t these senators representing their voters? Isn’t there something profoundly amiss in that decision? Something elitist, even anti-democratic?
The relatively small number of athletes involved does not make the issue small at all. First, egregious cheating is not excusable in the public consciousness just because “it’s only a few cheaters.” Sports are no longer sports when there is cheating, records are no longer records when there is cheating, which is why cheating is punished so harshly by sports associations.
In addition, the sheer number of women displaced by one man is not to be calculated additively; it is multiplicative. One “winning” male displaces at least three women in every competition he wins, and if he enters 10 competitions, he has displaced 30 women. The effects are both cascading and devastating. Sites like SheWon.org document how many women have been affected by males participating in their sports. Furthermore, female athletes have been injured, sometimes seriously, by male athletes; Payton McNabb, who was invited to President Donald Trump’s address to Congress, is but one example.
And yet Democrats seem to believe that few people care about this issue. That is belied by the polls — there are very few undecideds when pollsters ask about males competing in women’s sports. In The New York Times/Ipsos poll, only 3% of those polled were undecided, an unusually low figure for political polls. In addition, according to an analysis of the ads run in the 2024 presidential campaign, “The Trump campaign’s ad with its now-famous tag line, ‘Kamala Harris is for they/them; Donald Trump is for you,’ was seen more often by more people than any other anti-Harris ad, voters brought it up spontaneously in focus groups, and it shaped their opinions on both Harris and the Democratic Party. Among swing voters, it was the most frequently cited reason not to choose Kamala Harris.” Democrats are fooling themselves if they believe voters don’t care about these issues.
And half of those voters are women. For decades, the Democratic Party has relied on women’s votes, even styling the party as “the party for women.” This support largely centered around abortion rights. Now that the issue of abortion has been returned to the states, candidates for national office can no longer rely on women for the “abortion vote,” and that was seen in the 2024 election results, where Kamala Harris received a smaller share of the women’s vote than Joe Biden. Democratic congressmen from New York and Massachusetts blamed the Democratic Party’s stance on including males in women’s sports as a key issue turning off women’s support.
Women actually do care about women’s sports; we don’t see it as a “fringe” issue, and it feels condescending and demeaning when our concerns are so blithely dismissed by one of the two major political parties in our system of government. I have heard many women, longtime Democratic voters, who say they now feel politically homeless due to the Democratic Party’s stance on these issues.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is one of the first high-profile Democratic politicians to finally break ranks. Two days after the regrettable vote in Congress, Newsom, with an eye toward 2028, was asked about the issue on a podcast and forthrightly answered, “I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness — it’s deeply unfair. I am not wrestling with the fairness issue. I totally agree with you.” Pressed on the subject, he admitted his party was out of step with the American public: “We’re getting crushed on it. Crushed. Crushed.”
The former Democratic mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, immediately branded his remarks “disgusting.” More bizarrely, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, looking like a deer in the headlights when asked about Newsom’s remarks, gathered his thoughts and stated, “I haven’t seen his comments, what Democrats oppose was unleashing sexual predators on girls throughout the United States of America.”
Apparently, Democrats explained their opposition to the bill in question by stating that schoolchildren wishing to play sports would have to have their bodies inspected by people who might be sexual predators. Is it really possible that the House Minority Leader of the United States of America has never heard of cheek swabs for DNA testing? Baffling. And while we are at it, we could argue that under its policies the previous Democratic administration did, at times, unleash sexual predators on women in women’s prisons, spas and restrooms.
In the end, however, the issue is not simply about fairness, or fairness for women. In a sense, this issue is a litmus test concerning how much in touch with reality your national representative is. If your senator cannot immediately see that sex differences are real and males should not be competing in women’s sports, they are arguably not coming from a reality-based view of the world. Why would anyone vote for a candidate so out of touch with reality? It leads one to ask what else about reality they might be out of touch with, such as realities at the border, realities of trade, realities concerning national defense. It’s a worrying red flag, to be sure.
It’s unclear whether the Democratic Party’s stance is primarily disingenuous, or reflects that the party is in deep denial. If, as Democrats suggest, this is a “non-issue,” why would they use the political whip to enforce bloc voting in order to defeat this bill? Surely the Democratic Party has run the numbers on the 2024 election and must know this is a losing issue for them. Either way, this is an “own goal” for the party which will haunt it for the next several election cycles until a new generation of Democratic candidates quietly de-canonizes the issue. That this is the hill the Democrats would choose to die on in 2025 is utterly bewildering. One day I hope we will hear the back story on this.
The 2026 midterm elections will be here before you know it. Remember that if your senator is a Democrat and their name isn’t Slotkin or Welch, they voted against fair, safe sports for women. Hold them accountable for that choice.