Mother Jones50%
The Heritage Foundation Only Wanted to Protect Women’s Sports When It Was About Trans Athletes 69%
By Madison Pauly0%
7/22/2026, 10:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Ambiguity (Equivocation), and Recency Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 21% saturation with 274 hits. Analysis detected 2,059 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,302 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 62.9% and a BS Rank of 69% (6,148 of 19,671 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 68.70% of the article peer group.
About a week after its allies won a Supreme Court ruling allowing states to ban transgender girls from girls’ school athletics, a leading conservative group that has campaigned for seven years to “protect women’s sports” is singing a very different tune.
On July 8, the Heritage Foundation—the right-wing think tank widely known for sponsoring Project 2025—published a report calling for the rollback of the very landmark federal protections for women’s sports that have driven their explosion in popularity over the last five decades.
The paper , by Heritage senior research fellow and Boise State University professor Scott Yenor, argued for “restoring a flexible approach to athletics” by exempting sports from Title IX, the 1972 federal law that bans sex discrimination in education, or else loosening the law’s requirements.
The paper is laced with stereotypes about women’s “natural preferences”—describing women as having “gentle, graceful, cooperative tendencies” and being “oriented toward motherhood and traditional feminine graces.”
Blatant sexism is to be expected from Yenor, who in 2021 ignited a firestorm at Boise State when he described career-oriented women as “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.”
But even though much of the conservative movement, including the Heritage Foundation, has spent the last several years crowing about the importance of protecting women’s sports using Title IX—in the context of banning trans women athletes —they’re not laughing Yenor out of the room this time .
Over the last week and a half, his argument has been published or covered by right-wing outlets the Daily Signal , the College Fix , and Compact magazine, among others.
The conflict over transgender athletes is “breathing new life” into old conservative arguments against women’s competitive sports.
The conflict over transgender athletes—which leans heavily on rhetoric about the sexes having different inherent athletic capabilities—is “breathing new life” into old conservative arguments against women’s competitive sports, says Deborah Brake, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and former senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center.
“The push to exclude trans girls from girls’ sports has never really been about transgender athletes,” Brake says.
“There’s a much bigger gender war that they are fighting about inherent, fixed biological difference.”
In his paper for the Heritage Foundation, Yenor argues that schools should be allowed to “accommodate sex differences” by replacing competitive women’s sports opportunities with “cheerleading, dance, yoga, hiking clubs, recreational intramurals, and other athletic opportunities more aligned with average female interests and tendencies.”
High-intensity exercise, he notes, “increases infertility.”
(Women who exercise “too much” may indeed have a harder time getting pregnant, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists —but some research suggests those effects are mitigated as long as they eat enough.
Anyway, it’s not altogether clear that getting pregnant is a priority for the school-age athletes Yenor is writing about.)
Meanwhile, Yenor advocates expanding men’s athletics: “Restoring a healthier balance involves protecting and even expanding men’s sports while allowing natural variation in program offering.”
Of course, cutting women’s competitive sports in favor of dance and yoga classes would reverse an over 50-year trend in women’s sports.
Since Title IX was enacted, the number of high school girls playing varsity sports has risen from 300,000 to 3.4 million, according to a 2022 report from the Women’s Sports Foundation.
In 1972, 15 percent of college athletes were women; by 2018, that number hit 44 percent.
“Title IX transformed American sports and American life,” Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh opened his trans athlete opinion in June, before ruling that Title IX allowed states to ban transgender girls from girls’ school sports teams, no matter their hormone levels or medical circumstances.
Yenor specifically takes aim at a piece of federal agency guidance issued in 1979, describing three alternate ways for schools to prove they are providing equal athletic opportunity to women.
Under this “ three-part test ,” schools can either 1) maintain numbers of women student athletes proportionate to women’s enrollment; 2) have a continuing history of expanding women’s competitive sports; or 3) demonstrate they have “fully and effectively” accommodated interest among female students.
Today, when girls fight back against a school’s decision to cut their volleyball team, for example, they can win if they show that their school has done none of the above.
“Without the three-part test, ‘equal athletic opportunity to participate in sports’ has no teeth,” Brake says.
Courts have historically rejected attempts to toss or weaken this framework, according to Brake.
The “[Heritage] report is mostly a rehashing of the same losing arguments from the early days of Title IX litigation, using the recent transgender panic as a catalyst to revive them,” she says.
“The law has been stable for a long time.”
But according to Duke Law School professor Doriane Coleman, that status quo suddenly became more vulnerable two years ago, when the Supreme Court ruled in Loper Bright Enterprises v.
Raimondo that judges don’t have to defer to federal agency interpretations of the law.
Could Loper Bright invalidate the guidance that’s been used to expand and protect women’s sports for decades?
At least two high-ranking federal judges think so.
In January, the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against female students who sued the University of Kentucky (coincidentally, anti-trans activist Riley Gaines’ alma mater ) to create Division I equestrian, field hockey, and lacrosse teams.
The students lost after the courts agreed that there wasn’t enough interest among the student body to field competitive teams in those sports.
But two of the three appeals court judges went much further, adding that the whole three-part test could be tossed.
“We are skeptical of this guidance’s validity,” they wrote in a concurring opinion .
“The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare adopted the guidance in a different world, one where the modern Department of Education did not yet exist and one where courts routinely deferred to agency interpretations of statutes and regulations.”
Coleman says she believes the three-part test isn’t “fit for purpose” today, in part because of the modern popularity of women’s sports and the increasing share of college students who are women.
An opponent of trans girls participating in competitive girls’ athletics—though she’s more lenient when it comes to no-cut teams and recreational leagues—Coleman agrees with Yenor, the Heritage author, on some points: “I don’t think he’s wrong that the numbers of women who are interested in—and I mean interested [in], not capable [of]—participating in elite sports are different from the numbers of men,” she says.
When girls reach their mid-teens, she says, “Your body just changes, and hips pop out and your breasts pop out, you just can’t do some of the things you used to be able to do really well.”
Yenor’s proposal to count yoga and dance classes toward Title IX’s equal athletic opportunity requirements is “interesting,” Coleman says.
But as a former champion runner herself, she’s concerned such a move could create cover for schools to cut or defund elite women’s sports programs.
“The thing that it hides, and the thing that makes me worried,” she adds, “is [that] it could be a strategy for decreasing commitment for those female student athletes who are real D1 competitive badasses.”
On the whole, Coleman thinks it’s unlikely that gains in women’s school sports could be reversed: “We’ve gone way past the point where we don’t understand that female athletes are as physical and competitive, in their own way, as men are.”
And Brake, for her part, still considers the “three-part test” settled law.
Then again, Brake adds, “I’ve been surprised about a lot of what’s been happening in the last year and a half on discrimination law and gender.
Things that we thought were long settled, this administration has been trying to completely turn back the clock—not years, but decades.”
Analysis
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