Now They've Defeated 'Biological Men In Women's Sports' They Can Move On To Defeating Women's Sports

The bad faith it burns.

Photo by John Torcasio on Unsplash

The American political press, defanged and traumatized by 50 years of right-wing attacks as well as captured by oligarchs who want a quick and tidy end to democracy, was either unable or unwilling to report honestly on Project 2025 in the final months of the 2024 election, and today we pay a steep and escalating cost for that.

That includes, naturally, the increasingly tenuous role of women in American society. Pete Hegseth is firing any and every woman in the military who has ever been so much as considered for a promotion; state-level Republicans are pushing new and sadistic ways to punish women for seeking — or god forbid, obtaining — abortion services; women professors are being targeted for merely existing; and regime-aligned media appears more and more interested in the prospect of eviscerating women’s sports in the US.

Ladies can’t be barefoot and pregnant and making sandwiches if they’re shooting hoops or dribbling downfield or dodging defenders on the football field, after all. Try to drill a 15-foot jumper while putting together a ham sandwich. You can’t. I’ve tried.

---

The button below will take any amount of your choosing, one-time or monthly, at Paypal, or we have a Patreon too.

Also! A Venmo!

---

After using women’s sports as a convenient cudgel against trans athletes — with the anti-constitutional Supreme Court majority recently greenlighting Republican efforts to bar trans folks from the playing field — the plan is now to unwind decades of progress in women’s sports by hollowing out Title IX, the landmark 1972 legislation that says no one can be discriminated against in education based on their sex. This, as you might know, is in line with the gender-based goals of Project 2025, which seeks to roll back the 20th century one legal body blow at a time.

I argued in a Bad Faith Times blog shortly after the SCOTUS decision against trans athletes that the American Right’s sudden adoration of women’s sports and Title IX was a slick bad-faith trick meant to cover for their prejudice and fear and hatred of transgender people. As with almost every issue in the modern, poisoned, degraded political landscape, Republicans can’t say what they mean for fear of alienating and horrifying everyone outside their cultish base. So it is with trans athletes: We love women’s sports, they say with one voice, a collective smirk barely concealed, and we won’t let guys with wigs and skirts destroy the sports we love so dearly. This nonsense comes after decades of right wingers engaging in endless mockery of any and all women’s sports. Their transformation into Title IX defenders has always been implausible.

The Heritage Foundation, which conjured Project 2025 from the hottest part of hell as corporate America worked furiously to undermine the Biden administration and re-install their Magic Man into office, is open about the Republican plan to destroy Title IX without outright repealing it — now that trans athletes have been booted from the sporting landscape and the Right no longer has to muster feigned concern for lady sports.

The Heritage proposal to massacre Title IX is multipronged and a little complicated, but it would essentially stop applying key parts of the Education Department’s traditional test for complying with the law. That includes proportionality. The Heritage Foundation proposal, pitched with misogynistic glee by Boise State professor Scott Yanor, might not destroy the country’s most treasured women’s sports programs, as The Defector’s Diana Moskovitz pointed out. It would, however, make life difficult-bordering-on-impossible for smaller college programs that don’t have armies of millionaire boosters shoveling cash at them every day of the year.

Yanor’s opposition to women’s sports — and women’s place in society more broadly — is evident in everything he says about ways the Right can make the US a less free and fair place. Yanor has called Title IX a “a powerful engine of feminist social engineering” and talks freqeuntly about so-called biological destiny — that thing where a person born with a vagina has precious few avenues to a full life because men like Yanor said so, but maybe God did too. It’s hard to say. Anyway, this is How Things Should Be. Otherwise it wouldn’t be called Biological Destiny, a very real term that was not made up by a dude who got passed over for a promotion in favor of a woman.

That the Trump regime manages a hotline for white guys who have been victimized by diversity programs should come as no surprise, and yet somehow it does.

The American Right using Title IX to stop a young woman from playing catcher on a softball team before turning around and outlining a plan for annihilating Title IX demonstrates the depths of the bad faith involved in this whole regressive program. Republicans and their media allies will use widely supported concepts to attack the legal and political pillars that have upheld efforts for fairness for the past half century. Today we see this with Title IX. A few months ago we saw it when Education Secretary and Wrestling Lady Linda McMahon claimed DEI programs were inherently discriminatory toward white public school students. McMahon didn’t mean that. It was good posturing though. Thankfully it failed because a judge who values the Constitution and laws and whatnot saw through the bad-faith veneer.

Maybe — probably — the right-wing effort to dismantle Title IX won’t succeed, at least not in the long term. But watching Heritage Foundation goons and Trump regime officials go after the law after conventionally using it in their assault on trans athletes only highlights how blatant this bad-faith approach has become, and how appallingly big media outlets have failed to call out that bad faith in this second Trump term. Until that changes, until The Newspaper starts questioning the honesty of the American Right’s aims, Republicans will continue using bad faith as their One Weird Trick to achieving every hideous goal on their big fascist checklist.