The College Sports Dispute Fracturing Conservatives

The coalition that built a motto around “protect women’s sports” is splintering as some conservatives argue that a decades-old policy boosting female athletes is a threat to men.

Republicans found years of political success uniting against transgender athletes, a push that helped them energize voters in a range of elections and divide Democrats. But the movement is now fraying after two influential conservative organizations, including The Heritage Foundation, started openly attacking bedrock anti-sex discrimination policy that’s fueled women’s sports for decades.

A recent paper published by Heritage argues that longstanding sports policy tied to Title IX, the federal law barring sex discrimination, is “a failed experiment.” The policy was built on the mistaken assumption that women are just as interested in competitive sports as men and has evolved into a tool of “feminist social engineering,” the paper adds, factors that are leading to cuts in men's sports like wrestling, gymnastics and tennis.

These arguments land as both parties position themselves to appeal to disaffected young men and conservative groups press Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take sides.

They’ve also outraged conservative women leaders who say the new effort could damage a movement that’s resonated in red states and with President Donald Trump. Those who cited the law in their push to keep transgender athletes out of women’s sports say they didn’t sign up to start culling athletic opportunities for women and girls.

“We have worked so hard to protect women's sports that at this point we're not getting on board with anything that wants to dismantle it in any way,” said Beth Parlato, senior legal counsel at the Independent Women's Law Center. The conservative women’s group has played a key role in giving a platform to female athletes like Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer who became a leading figure of the movement after competing against a transgender athlete.

“We still need equal opportunity for women. Period,” Parlato said. “That's what we're fighting for. We can't go backwards.”

The dispute centers on a decades-old interpretation of Title IX that has clarified how the federal law applies to athletics since 1979. Specifically, conservative groups are sparring over the proportionality test, one of three ways schools can demonstrate that male and female students receive equal athletic opportunities. Under the standard, athletic participation rates should roughly match a school's male-female enrollment ratio.

Supporters of the policy say it has been one of the most important drivers behind the expansion of women's sports after Title IX became law in 1972. It has helped girls' participation in high school sports grow from less than 300,000 athletes to roughly 3.5 million over the past four decades. More than 242,300 female athletes also competed in the NCAA across divisions in the 2024-25 school year — a record high.

But some critics argue that women aren’t as interested in sports as men and that the policy pressures schools to eliminate men's teams while women’s college enrollment, which has outpaced men’s for decades, and sports opportunities continue to grow.

“College athletics has become something that is a quota system, not something that's responding to interest levels,” said Jonathan Butcher, acting director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy. “And taking things away from males in athletics is not doing anything to help females in athletics.”

It is not a new argument, but critics of the policy see an opportunity to end it under the second Trump administration, whose officials have been rescinding equity policies in the name of restoring equality. Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson, standing next to Vice President JD Vance at a press conference last week, lauded administration officials for “protecting white American men from discrimination.”

Butcher said the Trump administration “has been more interested in the idea of equality under the law and what we would consider fairness and common sense.”

The White House didn’t comment for this report.

The timing is ripe for a discussion about the guidance since the Education Department is expected to soon undertake rulemaking on Title IX to define sex in the law as based on a person's biology at birth, supporters of withdrawing the guidance say. The agency’s planned change stems from the national debate over transgender athletes in women’s sports.

Caleb Trotter, senior attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, the other conservative group pushing for changing the policy, said that the proportionality test has outlived its purpose and that eliminating it won’t trigger a return to “a massive disparity in opportunities between males and females because society has changed.”

“At some point, there has to be an end point for using a discriminatory measure, and I think we're there now and we have been for a while,” Trotter said. “I don't think the fears of going back to the dark ages of female sports are accurate.”

Trotter’s organization has filed a petition asking the Education Department to rescind the Title IX guidance. The organization argues the test has contributed to increases in women’s teams and — except for football or basketball — cuts to men's sports teams.

The agency didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor has it issued a decision or said when it might do so.

But Trotter argues the fight isn’t just to support men’s teams.

“This isn't pro-male, pro-female,” he said. “It is solely focused on equal opportunity for all students, all athletes, regardless of sex.”

It's been nearly 20 years since Trotter’s group last submitted a similar petition to the Education Department — a request President George W. Bush’s Education Secretary Margaret Spellings ultimately denied. But his group is also representing student-athletes challenging California Baptist University’s decision to eliminate men’s golf, swimming and diving, and wrestling, a case he hopes will reach the Supreme Court.

Arthur Bryant, a longtime Title IX litigator who has successfully challenged cuts to men’s and women's sports programs nationwide, criticized the idea that sports parity between the sexes has been achieved.

“Yes, the WNBA is doing incredibly well. Does anybody think it's doing as well as the NBA?” said Bryant, who was the lead co-counsel in the landmark Title IX case that cemented the three-part test that includes looking at the male-to-female enrollment ratio. “No one with their eyes and ears open can possibly think that women athletes are treated anywhere near close to men athletes.”

Even though more women enroll in college than men, more men participate in varsity college athletics, according to the Government Accountability Office. The 2024 report found that 40% of colleges had significant gaps between women’s enrollment and athletic participation rates, while offering no more women’s varsity sports in 2021-22 than they did more than a decade earlier.

Some conservative women leaders agree that cutting men’s sports doesn’t give women more opportunities. But they are concerned that the efforts could hurt the coalition they built across the aisle to advocate for banning transgender athletes from women’s sports.

“We're not even finished fighting to secure Title IX on its plain text,” said Sarah Parshall Perry, who previously was a senior legal fellow at Heritage and now serves as vice president for Defending Education, a conservative advocacy group.

Perry, who worked as senior counsel in the Education Department’s civil rights office during the first Trump administration, said she doesn’t believe “there's any interest from this administration” to revisit the proportionality rule — especially since the agency’s work related to transgender athletes remains unresolved.

The Supreme Court in June upheld state bans but did not decide whether state policies allowing trans students to participate on sports teams aligned with their gender identity are illegal. Voters have put measures on the ballot in four states — including three with Democratic governors — this year that would implement these bans, and groups like Independent Women's Law Center are planning to pressure state lawmakers when they return for session next year.

“It does a disservice to the work of the conservatives who worked so hard to reach across the aisle to progressives and to the women's liberation movement proponents who themselves were wary of conservatism to begin with because of its reputation as subjugating women,” Perry said. “Then you see a report like this, which goes right to the criticism we have been bucking for the better part of six or seven years.”

These women take particular issue with the stance outlined in The Heritage Foundation report written by Scott Yenor, chair of its American Citizenship Initiative, who Heritage declined to make available for an interview. The think tank has had a strong influence over Trump administration policy decisions.

Yenor’s social arguments differ from those put forth by the PLF even though they are seeking to accomplish the same goal. Yenor argued Title IX should accommodate what he describes as natural differences in male and female athletic interests — including that being competitive is “much more central to male identity.”

Parlato, with the Independent Women's Law Center, flatly rejected Yenor’s arguments.

“I'm highly competitive. My daughters were highly competitive,” she said. “Just making a sweeping statement in the report that we're not as competitive, … it didn't sit well with me. It was almost that we were less than.”

College football — not women’s sports — and schools’ financial concentration in only a few men’s sports are the main drivers of cuts to smaller and nonrevenue men’s sports, said Donna Lopiano, who was appointed to be the first director of women's athletics at the University of Texas in 1975. Lopiano that year also testified before Congress to block a proposal that would have exempted revenue-producing sports such as football from Title IX compliance.

She said the law allows schools the flexibility to decide how they allocate resources within men's or women's athletics. They can “treat revenue-producing sports better than women’s,” she said, as long as there is equitable opportunity.

“If the women want to spend it on one sport, they can,” said Lopiano, who is now president of a sports management consulting firm. “And if the men want to spend it on one sport, they can. … Who gets screwed when they do it? Men's nonrevenue sports.”

She also believes there’s something more fundamental at stake.

“We have a generation of women who have no idea what Title IX was all about — how hard fought that was,” Lopiano said. “We can't lose it now.”