In the wake of the Supreme Court’s West Virginia v. B.P.J. decision in June, which holds that Title IX permits schools to determine eligibility for women’s sports based on “biological sex” and declares that “sex” in Title IX “cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex,” the conservative movement’s latest move on women’s sports makes its priorities unmistakable. The Court’s insistence on a purely biological definition of sex gives legal cover to those who want to re‑naturalize gender hierarchy in education and athletics.

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For years, right-wing organizations like the Heritage Foundation have insisted that bans on trans girls are necessary to “protect fairness” and preserve cis girls’ opportunities in school athletics. Now, in Dr. Scott Yenor’s new report Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity, that same institution turns its fire on cis girls’ sports themselves, arguing that Title IX has gone too far in building competitive women’s athletics and that the real victims are men and boys whose sports and educational pathways have been disrupted.

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In the report, Yenor casts Title IX as a “failed experiment” because it has turned cis girls into “more aggressive, more competitive, more male” athletes and forced schools to cut non‑revenue men’s teams to comply with equality requirements. His answer is to roll back women’s varsity sports, redirect girls into yoga, hiking, and recreational movement, and restore men’s “natural” dominance in competitive athletics, transforming a campaign that once claimed to save girls from “biological males” into an open effort to save men’s sports from cis “aggressive” girls.

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He frames this as a story of feminist “social engineering” gone wrong, arguing that Title IX imposed an “androgynous, high‑competition model” on women’s sports that distorts “natural patterns of participation.” Participation disparities are treated not as the legacy of exclusion, but as proof that women are inherently suited to low‑intensity, non‑competitive activities while men are inherently suited to contact sports and high‑stakes varsity play. When courts and regulators read lower female participation as discrimination, Yenor accuses them of “denying nature” and insists that law should accommodate “genuine differences in interest” rather than “engineer parity.” Under that logic, the problem is not that girls have too few opportunities to play; the problem is that some girls have become too competitive.

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This logic of blaming Title IX for turning girls and women into competitive “threats” is consistent with the logic used to justify bans on trans girls in sports. In both narratives, what is really being defended is not girls’ safety or fairness, but men’s ownership of competitive athletics. The same three moves keep showing up.

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First, both rely on “nature” and fixed sex difference to police who gets to play. In the trans context, “biological sex” becomes a weapon to reclassify trans girls as “really” boys and push them out of women’s sports. In Yenor’s Title IX story, the same appeal to nature is aimed at cis girls: he claims women are naturally drawn to non-competitive and gentle exercise, and treats varsity sport as an unnatural, masculinizing detour that must be corrected to restore “femininity” and even fertility. Biology becomes destiny, and any girl who does not fit that destiny—trans or cis—is treated as an error to be corrected.

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Second, the imagined “threat” is just reassigned to different girls. When the focus is on trans girls, they are cast as invading “biological males” who will steal cis girls’ medals and scholarships. When the focus shifts to Title IX itself, any cis girl athlete who is strong, aggressive, or unapologetically competitive is reframed as a feminist mistake, a girl gone too far who disrupts the sex‑segregated order of sport. Either way, the message is that cis girls are only safe when they stay on the softer edges of athletics, when their bodies do not challenge men’s superiority.

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Third, both erase the diversity of sports itself. Sport is reduced to a narrow image of hard contact, brute strength, and high‑stakes competition, coded as masculine and therefore properly male. Everything else, ranging from artistic sports, aesthetic performance, to community‑oriented play, is trivialized or treated as “feminine.” That flattening makes it easier to claim that trans girls and cis competitive girls alike are out of place. It refuses to see all the ways girls and women already inhabit sport differently and legitimately, whether in figure skating, bodybuilding, or team sports that center cooperation and care as much as speed and strength.

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All of this panic around women’s sports—from state bans on trans girls to Yenor’s call to roll back Title IX—circles back to a single fear: the fear of losing male superiority in sports. Whether the supposed culprit is trans girls, or “aggressive” cis girl athletes, the anxiety is the same. Men’s teams, men’s scholarships, men’s uncontested dominance are treated as the natural baseline, and any challenge to that baseline is framed as a crisis.

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That is why, as Professor Deborah Brake points out, “The push to exclude trans girls from girls’ sports has never really been about transgender athletes. There’s a much bigger gender war that they are fighting about inherent, fixed biological difference.” Biology is invoked not only to eject trans girls from girls’ teams, but to push cis girls back into “gentle,” fertility‑friendly movement and out of the kinds of competitive sports that once belonged only to men. The ultimate project is not protecting girls. It is policing womanhood and preserving men’s uncontested claim to sport as a site of power.

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July 26, 2026