January 14, 2025, House vote
On August 18, 1920, Tennessee legislator Harry Burn made history by voting to ratify the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed women the right to vote. He was planning to vote against ratification, but changed sides at the last minute and voted yes. He did it because it was the right thing to do, and because his mother, Febb E. Burn, told him to. He explained, “I knew that a mother’s advice is always safest for a boy to follow and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification. I appreciated the fact that an opportunity such as seldom comes to a mortal man to free 17 million women from political slavery was mine.” It was Burn’s vote that secured final victory for women’s suffrage in the U.S.
Today, House Representatives Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) failed to follow Burn’s example; they voted no on the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. However, two Democrats did vote yes on the bill: Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, both from Texas.
WDI USA has supported this bill since 2023. We submitted a letter of support stating:
The U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International supports the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023. Women’s Declaration International (WDI) is a global, nonpartisan group of volunteer radical feminist women dedicated to protecting women’s sex-based rights. WDI USA is its U.S. chapter. WDI is based on the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, which has 35,000 signatures globally.
WDI USA supports this bill on the basis of Article 7 of the Declaration, “Reaffirming women’s rights to the same opportunities as men to participate actively in sports and physical education,” which is consistent with Article 10 (g) of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), as well as with the Title IX Education Amendments of 1972.
In recent years, there has been an incursion of men and boys into women’s and girls’ athletic competitions on the basis of so-called “gender identity,” a linguistic mechanism by which men and boys claim the identity of women and girls. This claim has no basis in observable material reality.
The provision of single-sex sports is necessary if women and girls are to have opportunities that are on a par with those of men and boys.
If single-sex sports continue to be eroded, more and more women and girls will lose their spots on teams and podiums to males. This is in direct opposition to the intended purpose of Title IX (i.e., providing equal access to sports participation for women and girls), as well as common sense and the principles of fairness in athletic competitions. It is fairness – a level playing field –that must prevail over arguments about the inclusion of males as females, if women’s and girls’ sports are to exist as legitimate competitions. The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023 defines sex as based solely on a person’s immutable reproductive biology and genetics and would thereby give federal protection to women’s sports in the United States under title IX.
Former WDI USA president Kara Dansky published an article that year, making the case for progressives to support the bill, which is consistent with Article 7 of the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights. It passed in the House without a yes vote from a single Democrat. There is simply no excuse for Democrats not to vote yes.
Last year, in the wake of the 2024 presidential election, two House Democrats made sensible statements about the importance of female-only sports, calling on Democrats to have open and honest conversations on the topic. They were representatives Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY).
WDI USA was cautiously hopeful that they would vote yes, and we asked signatories to the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights to call their offices, urging them to do so. We were disappointed, but not surprised, when they did not.
During debate on the bill, Democrat after Democrat stood up and called it the “Republican Child Predator Empowerment Act,” lied by saying the bill would require “genital inspections,” and claimed that the bill would harm women and girls who do not conform to the sex stereotypes of femininity. Nothing could be further from the truth, and WDI USA firmly supports women who reject the constraints of femininity, as we have said time after time.
Representative Rulli (R-OH) recounted a moving story about a lesbian couple who approached him in a grocery store in his district, pulled him aside, and asked him to protect women’s sports by voting yes. Lauren Levey, the coordinator of WDI USA’s Lesbian Caucus, notes:
Femininity is submission — the opposite of what is needed to succeed in athletic competition. The claim by a Democratic lawmaker that the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act would bar unfeminine women and girls from competing in women’s and girls’ sports is deceitful and cynical. The proponents of gender identity ideology — supported by the Democratic Party — have consistently excluded unfeminine women, and especially lesbians, from the category of women and girls, because they define that category by reference to feminine stereotypes rather than reproductive biology (which, by the way, can be noninvasively determined using a cheek swab). Now suddenly a Democrat is expressing performative protectiveness toward lesbian athletes.
I remember when the Democratic Party was the champion of equal rights for all women and girls, including lesbians. Equal to whom? To men and boys, of course. Everyone knows what a woman is; and anyone who says men can be women is simply lying. The Democratic Party has lost their ethical high ground as well as their common sense, and the world can see it.
Representatives Moulton and Suozzi should have followed in the footsteps of Harry Burn and made history yesterday by voting yes on the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, thereby becoming the first Democrats to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls at the federal level. We’re grateful that Representatives Cuellar and Gonzalez bucked the party trend and did the right thing by voting to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls.
