Following a recent Supreme Court decision, the Heritage Foundation, is calling for Title IX to be rewritten to remove requirements for equality between men and women’s sports programing at universities.
The case was West Virginia v B.P.J. The Supreme Court ruling stated that schools may provide separate girls’ and boys’ sports teams defined by biological sex.
The short version of what the ruling means boils down to states can now exclude trans people from school sports without violating Title IX.
Scott Yenor, a senior fellow of the Heritage Foundation, is calling for Title IX to be rewritten to remove requirements for equality between men and women’s sports programing at universities.
“Equality under Title IX does not require identical outcomes or the erasure of sex differences,” Yenor writes in a July 8 Heritage Foundation report—entitled, “Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity”—while claiming that women would rather do yoga than play “competitive varsity sports.”
“(Title IX) requires opportunity rooted in human nature that will reveal genuine differences between the sexes,” he writes. “Recovering an approach that accommodates the partly natural, partly cultural differences between the sexes can sustain vibrant women’s sports, protect and perhaps expand male opportunities, and contribute to a healthier, more humane social order,” Yenor states.
While Yenor’s “report” might be dismissed as offensive misogyny, his role and the power that the Heritage Foundation have over U.S. politics under President Donald Trump make this more concerning. This is a mission statement from the Heritage Foundation who, having won the anti-trans sports case at the Supreme Court now want to take up an anti-woman cause.
The Heritage Foundation members are the architects behind Project 2025, the anti-LGBTQ+ policy recommended by/for The Trump Administration. Members of the right-wing think-tank (aka The Heritage Foundation) are now installed in powerful positions as part of the Trump administration. Russ Vought, who is credited with writing Project 2025’s section on consolidating power within the executive branch, is now the head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.
Yenor was appointed as Heritage’s new director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies earlier this year after resigning from the University of Florida’s board of regents following concerns over his views on women. A controversial choice, he associates homosexuality with pedophilia, claims that homosexuality should be illegal, and that there should be no abortion. He has also suggested that the U.S. Civil Rights Act should be revised to remove protections against workplace sex discrimination.
Yenor claims that the Title IX requirements should be altered to allow women to be excluded from some sports with different options offered instead. In his view, the requirement that women be offered the same programing as men means that universities are spending money on undesired activities, and when team rosters aren’t full, it is seen as a failure on the part of the university. This, he argues, is because there are fundamental differences between men and women, and women don’t want to play high-intensity sports.
“Promoting assertive athletics formed a core element of a broader project to remake female character itself—producing a new woman who would be more aggressive, assertive, dominant, and less deferential, less graceful, and less oriented toward motherhood and traditional feminine graces,” Yenor says of female activists for inclusion in school sports.
Instead, Yenor claims that rather than providing access and opportunities to the same sports that are provided for men, compliance with Title IX should be eligible by offering alternatives, noting that “cheerleading, dance, yoga, hiking clubs, recreational intramurals, and other athletic opportunities more aligned with average female interests and tendencies.”
While there have been arguments that potential lower interest in certain sports among women comes from historically being shut out of those opportunities, Yenor has a different read. That exclusion was natural, and attempting to encourage women to participate in these high-intensity sports is “erasing sex difference” and “social engineering.” He decries how the “aggressive, dominance-oriented female athlete became the mandatory model, and more natural and diverse expressions of female interest in sport were sidelined.”
Yenor also argues that the requirements for equality in sports in Title IX are causing funding to be stripped from men’s sports to fund women’s sports (which he claims no one wants to play). But while men’s varsity levels sports have seen funding cuts, studies suggest that it has nothing to do with women’s sports.
According to one 2023 study, when men’s sports funding is cut, those funds are not used to fund women’s sports, but are reallocated to “men’s basketball, football, or capital projects associated with men’s basketball of football.” That is, universities are cutting some men’s sports to put money into other men’s sports where they dream of being national contenders.
It’s also worth noting that Yenor sets the tone for his “report” with a claim that “in 2024, a Tunisian man defeated a Chinese woman for the Olympic women’s boxing gold medal.” While he goes on to talk of the “spectacle of a biological male pummeling a female athlete,” his claim is transphobic and not based in any element of truth.
He is alluding to professional boxer Imane Khelif, who is Algerian. She is female and has explicitly stated that she is not transgender. Despite the accusations of transphobic people, including well-known transphobes Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and Space X founder and former advisor to President Trump, Elon Musk.
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