Get back in the kitchen? After attacking trans women, the right’s next sports target is Title IX.

Last month, Title IX was seen as something anti-trans activists sought to protect in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on trans athletes.

Last week, one the most prominent anti-LGBTQ lobbies, the Heritage Foundation, put forth a report calling Title IX a “failed experiment” and that women’s sports are an example of “gender ideology.” Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools, fueled the rise of women’s sports at the collegiate level.

In the report, Heritage Foundation fellow and Boise State political science professor Scott Yenor used the backlash against transgender women athletes to help push women’s sports overall as the next target.

“To protect single-sex women’s sports, we must therefore revisit the deeper feminist settlement that has governed athletics for decades,” he wrote. “The current Title IX regime as applied to sports, and elsewhere, is part of a sustained social engineering effort that is designed to produce a new sort of woman: One that is more aggressive, more competitive, more male, less relational, and less oriented toward the goods of family and motherhood.”

This report is a particular vision of women’s athletics that involved limiting options for and access to sports only those who uphold the ideal of “traditional womanhood.” If this vision of sports were to start a TV network, it would probably be called “Handmaid’s Tale Sports.”

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I read this report imaging Yenor telling America’s top female athletes: “Ladies, turn in the jerseys, grab an apron and make me a sandwich!”

This is underscored by an assertion by Yenor that reveals the other linchpin.

“Many women are drawn to activities that emphasize rhythm, coordination, community and graceful exertion,” Yenor wrote. “A small but significant number thrive in highly competitive environments. Our goal, however, should be virtue and health grounded in reality and freedom, not the imposition of a male-oriented competitive ideal.

“The feminist settlement under Title IX has distorted natural patterns of participation by imposing an androgynous, high-competition model on women’s athletic endeavors while engineering numerical outcomes that harm men’s programs,” he said.

Read these together and you see how much the mask comes off. So much of this tome is centered around the “harm” women are causing men sports, and by extension, society. This is coming from the same people who were lauding Title IX a few weeks ago as something to defend against the “harm” a 1 15-year-old transgender girl in West Virginia allegedly caused just by showing up to compete. The hypocrisy would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.

Yenor also undercuts his credibility with a major fact error in the first sentence of the report: “In 2024, a Tunisian man defeated a Chinese woman for the Olympic women’s boxing gold medal.” False. He is discussing Imane Khelif, who is Algerian, not Tunisian, and is a woman, not a man.

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Ursinus College associate professor, sport historian and former NCAA Division I swimmer Johanna Mellis calls the report’s assertions strongly, noting the historical chauvinism behind its emphasis on medical data that alleges links between “elite high-intensity sports” and infertility.

“He is regurgitating well-debunked, pseudoscientific arguments about women’s genitals and uteruses being harmed when we play competitive sports,” Mellis told Outsports about Yenor’s report. “Why is Yenor thinking about our genitals and uteruses? Similar to how it is sick and predatory when people explicitly obsess over trans girls and women’s genitals, it is sick and predatory when Yenor obsesses about those of cis women, too.”

Turning back the clock

Mellis also described this as the centerpiece of a broader effort to roll back decades of gains for American women.

“Obviously, Yenor wants us women to comprise weaker bodies and minds in our society so that men like him can dominate us,” she said. “Whittling down opportunities for girls and women to play competitive sports is the main way he is trying to do this.

“He wants to decrease our presence in society, period. Shrinking our competitive opportunities will help ‘protect’ and might even increase men’s sports. This approach entails taking what little men like Yenor have been forced to allow us to experience on the field, by law, and give it back to them.”

What would be snatched away underlies the snake oil the conservative lobby is selling. We are talking about a negative redefinition of women’s sports at a time when participation among girls and women in our high schools and colleges is soaring. Television ratings and rights fees are showing that people watch women’s sports. As for success, in six of the last seven summer and winter Olympics, American women have won more medals than American men.

Given these facts it would be easy to dismiss this report, but before you do that consider Project 2025. Three years ago, some dismissed it. Today, that playbook has formed the cornerstone of U.S. administration policy.

A certain group of people would be favored if Yenor’s approach to sports and Title IX were to be implemented, but a vast majority of women and girls in and out, of sports wouldn’t be and that is by design.

The same design brought to you by people who have always wanted Title IX to fail.

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