New York Times House GOP-beat reporter (and frequent MSNBC presence) Annie Karni took the most cynical possible view of House Republicans attempt to protect women from men competing against them in sports in Wednesday’s edition, “Democrats Block Measure on Transgender Girls and Sports.”
By contrast, the filibustering Democrats who apparently want biological males to invade female sports competitions came off as heroic.
The cynicism started right from the lead sentence.
Democrats on Monday blocked a Republican-written bill aimed at barring transgender women and girls from school sports teams designated for female students, thwarting consideration in the Senate of the G.O.P.’s latest move to use transgender people as leverage at the dawn of President Trump’s second term.
With Democrats opposed, the measure stalled on a party-line vote of 51 to 45, falling short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster and be brought up for consideration. The bill, which passed the House in January on a largely party-line vote, would prohibit federal funding from going to K-12 schools that include transgender students in women’s and girls’ athletic programs.
When she says “transgender students,” Karni means “biological males” competing against girls.
Senate Republicans argued it was essential to protecting girls from predatory men encroaching on their private spaces and seeking to gain an unfair athletic advantage on the basis of sex, even as they hinted that the measure was intended to lay a political trap for Democrats.
“Democrats can stand for women or stand with a radical transgender ideology,” Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, said on Monday. If they opposed the legislation, he said, “they’ll have to answer to the women and girls they vote to disenfranchise.”
Democrats denounced the legislation as a craven effort by Republicans to wring political advantage from a small but vulnerable population of transgender children that would ultimately put at risk the girls it purported to protect.
Karni briefly cited polls showing even most Democrats “believed that biological males should not be allowed to play women’s sports,” then tried to minimize the damage to the trans-athlete cause with a “Yes, but” formulation.
Many congressional Democrats have agreed that there are real concerns about transgender athletes competing in women’s sports at the highest levels. But they have argued that athletic associations should be making those decisions, not lawmakers passing broad bills at the federal level that lump together competitive athletes and young children who simply want to participate in school activities with their friends.
Karni teamed with Democrats to minimize the outrage.
On Monday, Senate Democrats argued that the legislation was not only an attack on basic human dignity, but also a waste of time. Of more than 500,000 N.C.A.A. athletes, they noted, fewer than 10 identified as transgender.
Naturally, there was no mention of Peyton McNabb, a former volleyball player highlighted by Trump at the Joint Address to Congress Tuesday night, severely injured when playing for her high school girls volleyball team when she was spiked in the head by a transgender opponent in 2022.
