Josh Riley Stands Up To Anti-LGBT Bigotry
After some serious mistakes in his first week as a member of Congress, it’s good to see US Representative Josh Riley recover his sense of direction and make a sensible vote that matches the values of his constituents in New York’s 19th district.
The bill in question is H.R. 28, also known as the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025. You may be asking yourself just who women and girls in sports need protection from. Does H.R. 28 protect women and girls in sports from coaches who sexually harass or assault them? No. Does H.R. 28 protect women and girls in sports from high schools and universities that discriminate against their teams by providing less funding than they provide for men’s and boys’ teams? No, H.R. 28 doesn’t do that either.
The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 forces women and girls on teams at federally-funded schools to be subjected to genetic tests and physical examination of their genitals. If that doesn’t sound like protection to you, then you’re beginning to understand what H.R. 28 is all about.
This legislation doesn’t protect women and girls at all. It creates a new mechanism for authorities from Donald Trump’s fascist government to regulate the gender identities of women and girls - and of men and boys as well. It’s a culturally-extremist bill supported by Christian Nationalists to give them a foot in the door in establishing federal government authority to force Americans into rigid gender roles on the basis of their genetics.
H.R. 28 amends the Education Amendments of 1972 with the following language: “It shall be a violation of subsection (a) for a recipient of Federal financial assistance who operates, sponsors, or facilitates athletic programs or activities to permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls. For the purposes of this subsection, sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”
The legislation is based on scientifically outdated and culturally anachronistic understandings of the relationship between biological sex and social roles. It presumes that biological sex and gendered social roles are the same thing, and adopts the conservative Christian religious perspective that biological sex should determine social roles.
The facts of life are more complicated than what a simple biological division between girls and boys, or women and men can represent. For one thing, some people are born intersex. Intersex people have a variety of conditions in which their sex chromosomes do not match the appearance of their genitals, or in which their genitals are ambiguous, having some aspects of both male and female attributes.
Another complication is that gender identity and biological sex do not always correlate in a simple way that can be divided clearly into male or female. Gender identity is psychological and social. It’s about the way that a person feels about themselves, and the way that they present themselves within larger society. Gender is complex, and it’s not strictly determined by genetics or other biological factors. There are people with two X chromosomes that consider themselves male, and people with XY chromosomes that consider themselves female. For that matter, there are people with more than two sex chromosomes.
There have always been people whose gender identity is ambiguous, or is counter to social expectations for their biological characteristics. The difference now is that society has become more aware of the presence of these people, and more respectful of them. H.R. 28 is part of a Christian Nationalist backlash against this culture of respect. The legislation is a tool that’s being used to force all Americans to comply with conservative Christian beliefs about gender, whether they are Christian or not.
40 percent of Americans are non-Christian. What’s more, many Christians are not culturally conservative, and do not accept rigid Christian Nationalist beliefs about gender. That makes H.R. 28 an inappropriate attempt to impose one religious identity on all Americans.
Christian Nationalists have created a campaign of fear by spreading rumors that large numbers of boys and men are pretending to be transgender women and girls in order to unfairly obtain sports scholarships or enter into locker rooms to rape women and girls. There is no evidence that any such thing is actually happening.
The fact is that there are a very small number of transgender athletes in the United States. Only 1.4 percent of Americans between the ages of 13 and 17 identify as transgender. Very roughly speaking, about half of those would be transgender teenage girls. That’s 0.7 percent of the nation’s high school population. Then, only a portion of that 0.7 percent might even want to play on a high school sports team. That’s a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
Save Women’s Sports, a Christian Nationalist advocacy group dedicated to banning transgender Americans from playing sports, has only been able to identify FIVE transgender athletes on girls’ sports teams in kindergarten through high school grades in all of the United States. That’s not five percent of athletes on girls’ sports teams. It’s just five people. Five.
The presence of transgender athletes in collegiate sports is likewise tiny. Suzanne Bonamici, representing the 1st congressional district in Oregon, explained on the floor of the US House of Representatives:
This legislation would revoke all Federal funding from schools that include transgender students on girls' and women's sports teams. This is damaging and discriminatory to transgender students who benefit, as all students do, from participating in school sports, and it is also damaging to the entire school that is threatened because federal funding benefits all students. I remind my colleagues to keep in mind that as of last month, of the approximately 510,000 athletes who play at the NCAA level, 10 are transgender - not 10,000, 10 out of 510,000. Transgender students, like all students, deserve the same opportunity as their peers to learn teamwork, find belonging, and grow into well-rounded adults through sports.
There is not any large scale issue of transgender athletes, either in America’s high schools or in college sports. Through H.R. 28, however, Christian Nationalist members of Congress are seeking to create a nationwide campaign of intimidation that bullies American children and adults into strict, religiously-approved gender roles, whether they are playing sports or not. The creation of fear is the purpose of this legislation, as part of a larger fascist campaign to establish government control over culture, imposing the cultural preferences of Christian Nationalism.
The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 is scaremongering legislation that invents a problem that doesn’t exist. It does so in order to create a new method through which Christian Nationalists can bully children into compliance with their religious beliefs. Furthermore, the bill establishes a precedent for the US federal government to police Americans’ expressions of gender identity, telling us how we must behave, and how we must associate with other people, on the basis of genetics and anatomy.
Ayanna Pressley, representing the 7th congressional district in Massachusetts, rose to the floor of Congress to speak out against H.R. 28. She said,
“I rise today to call out harm and hypocrisy. This bill, H.R. 28, is couched as a bill that protects children, when it does the exact opposite. Madam Speaker, this bill not only erodes Federal protections for our kids, but it puts the physical and emotional safety of every child in our public schools at risk. Imagine that you are 8 years old, trying out for the soccer team, and your coach demands that you show them your genitals. That is abuse. That is exploitation. That is egregious, but it is exactly what this Republican bill does. It allows adults - not medical professionals, just random adults - to demand to inspect our child's genitals without parental consent.
As a survivor of a near-decade of childhood sexual abuse and as a bonus mom to a school-age daughter, I am horrified. To Members of Congress who support this legislation, you are putting the safety of children across this nation at risk. Why? Because you want to vilify and harm trans kids, children who should have every right to show up in this world and live and thrive like anyone else. You are punching down at the most vulnerable and exacting harm on everyone.
I would ask my colleagues: Have you spoken to any of these children? How about their parents? They pose no threat to you, but you pose a threat to them, denying them their healthcare, isolating them from their friends, creating conditions for bullying and even suicidal ideation. You are posing a threat to every child who wants to step onto a soccer field or pick up a softball bat in this country. Madam Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote no and to speak out in strong opposition to this disgusting, predatory bill that does nothing to keep a single child safe.”
When the time came to cast a vote on H.R. 28, Josh Riley did the right thing. In accordance with the values of Ithaca and Tompkins County, he voted against the legislation.
Unfortunately, Josh Riley’s opposition was not enough. H.R. 28 passed the US House of Representatives, and will now be considered by the United States Senate.
