About a week after its allies won a Supreme Court ruling allowing states to ban transgender girls from girls’ school athletics, a leading conservative group that has campaigned for seven years to “protect women’s sports” is singing a very different tune. On July 8, the Heritage Foundation—the right-wing think tank widely known for sponsoring Project 2025—published a report calling for the rollback of the very landmark federal protections for women’s sports that have driven their explosion in popularity over the last five decades.

The paper, by Heritage senior research fellow and Boise State University professor Scott Yenor, argued for “restoring a flexible approach to athletics” by exempting sports from Title IX, the 1972 federal law that bans sex discrimination in education, or else loosening the law’s requirements. The paper is laced with stereotypes about women’s “natural preferences”—describing women as having “gentle, graceful, cooperative tendencies” and being “oriented toward motherhood and traditional feminine graces.”

Blatant sexism is to be expected from Yenor, who in 2021 ignited a firestorm at Boise State when he described career-oriented women as “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” But even though much of the conservative movement, including the Heritage Foundation, has spent the last several years crowing about the importance of protecting women’s sports using Title IX—in the context of banning trans women athletes—they’re not laughing Yenor out of the room this time. Over the last week and a half, his argument has been published or covered by right-wing outlets the Daily Signal, the College Fix, and Compact magazine, among others.

The conflict over transgender athletes is “breathing new life” into old conservative arguments against women’s competitive sports.

The conflict over transgender athletes—which leans heavily on rhetoric about the sexes having different inherent athletic capabilities—is “breathing new life” into old conservative arguments against women’s competitive sports, says Deborah Brake, a law........

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