Republicans prior to President Reagan's party reset frequently paired social liberalism on racial and sexual issues with business-friendly policies, despite Richard Nixon's Southern strategy to win the presidency by siphoning off Democrats wary of the civil rights movement.

The Party of Lincoln returned to that rhetoric at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday on protecting women's sports from male competition, accusing the Democrats who uniformly boycotted the hearing of supporting misogynistic policies that subjugate women to the desires of men and push them "to the back of the bus," as one witness put it.

Opposition to coed competition nearly sunk Senate legislation to set national standards for college sports, based on concerns that the Protect College Sports Act could exempt the NCAA from state bans on males in women's sports. It now seems likely to pass the chamber as early as this week after Republicans added an amendment eliminating that interpretation.

No one at Wednesday's hearing mentioned the legislation, instead arguing unopposed — Democrats didn't use their two witness slots — that conditioning athletic eligibility on gender identity continued an American tradition of treating women like second-class citizens. 

"Women were last to get the vote, to participate in professions, to serve on juries, [and] get credit cards in their own names," said Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. "Women should not be asked again to cede their opportunities just to make men comfortable," trading "their gold medals for participating [sic] trophies." 

It's no "coincidence" that male participation in women's sports is growing amid viewership records and rising pay, Grassley said, crediting his home state's basketball legend Caitlin Clark for the spike in WNBA player salaries in this year's collective bargaining agreement.

Lawmakers touted their own fandom. Florida's Ashley Moody said she was once a "travel baseball mom," Grassley said he attended Northern Iowa's victory Friday over Wichita State in volleyball and South Carolina's Darline Graham said her daughter plays volleyball, a women's sport in which the Trump administration has intervened to keep men out.

Tennessee's Marsha Blackburn noted her resolution to designate Oct. 10 as American Girls in Sports Day, which she said alludes to the "Roman numerals XX" for the female sex chromosomes. She'll be wearing an XX shirt this Oct. 10.

'Institutionalized, sanctioned humiliation ritual'

Republicans repeatedly harped on Democrats for taking their ball and going home rather than hear out the witnesses. The panel's top Democrat, Illinois's Dick Durbin, said the issue is a low priority for Americans and called the hearing a "vendetta" against a tiny minority before leaving.

Moody trashed House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries for calling the GOP's Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act the "Child Predator Empowerment Act," based on activist talking points and false reporting that sex verification requires genital inspection.

Ceding a podium to a male has become an "institutionalized, sanctioned humiliation ritual" for female athletes, said Independent Council on Women’s Sports cofounder Kim Jones, once an All-American tennis player at Stanford. Her daughter competed against and shared a locker room with male swimmer Lia Thomas, who famously took a trophy from Riley Gaines.

Gaines and other female athletes subject to male competition, including plaintiff Lainey Armstead from the Supreme Court case that upheld state bans on males in girls' sports, spoke at a Senate Judiciary GOP press conference after the hearing.

"The message to young girls is that boys can be better female athletes than girls," former professional soccer player Carly Smolak said, questioning the viability of her career had her home state of Oregon — which Smolak called an oasis for girls' sports in the 1980s and 1990s — let males compete against her.

Coed participation is "mass grooming" of girls to suppress their "correct instincts to cater to the desires of boys," Smolak said. "Girls should not have to reach an elite status or age" to receive fair treatment, she added, referring to college and professional female-only rules that aren't uniform in high school girls' competition.

Smolak shared her horror at learning that her former team in Australian rules football added a male player, a former Marine, but didn't tell players he was a registered sex offender and had spent 15 years in a military prison for abusing children. The league passed the buck to the "personnel decisions" of clubs, she said.

Asked by Utah's Mike Lee about her safety concerns regarding men in the sport, which uses less padding than American football, Smolak cited tackling. "The athletes don't even have to be particularly skilled" to hurt women, even when middle-aged, and men are generally bigger, stronger, faster and often much taller, she said.

Sex screening less invasive than ever, female athletes have long supported

Only "mandatory, non-intrusive, inexpensive sex-verification screening," usually saliva-based, will ensure current and future generations of girls enjoy the same opportunities as Title IX's previous beneficiaries, said lawyer William Bock, best known as lead attorney for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency's probe of cyclist Lance Armstrong's government-sponsored team.

His ongoing lawsuit on behalf of Gaines and other female athletes, which completed legal discovery, argues the NCAA is bound by Title IX as an indirect recipient of federal funding via its college members and its research relationship with the Department of War, and thus must block males from women's sports to ensure equal opportunity for females.

Missouri's Josh Hawley marveled that the NCAA believes it's exempt from Title IX, based on a long-controversial Supreme Court precedent, which would mean "anything they do for women is just out of their good graces and we should all be thankful for what they do."

Interstate commerce and taxpayer support such as public funding for sports stadiums requires women's leagues to keep out men, Bock claimed, yet only the Women's Tennis Association among majors has set "strict biological standards." 

The WTA adopted SRY gene screening this summer, months after the International Olympic Committee. Jones noted the IOC stopped screening in the 2000 Sydney games, despite 82% of female athletes in a large survey after the 1996 Atlanta games supporting the protocol.

Many U.S. sports bodies are in "non- or partial compliance" with President Trump's executive order on women's sports, Bock claimed, citing the lack of "prescriptive terms," timelines for compliance and sanctions in the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee policy. 

The U.S. Soccer Federation allows males in women's competition if their "stated gender is sincerely held, and part of a person’s core identity."

NCAA president 'deliberately misled this committee'

Durbin's quick exit from the hearing meant others could rebut his claims without pushback.

The Illinois Democrat cited highly contested Trevor Project research that "stigmatization" drives higher suicide rates in LGBTQ youth, which Jones deemed age-old "emotional blackmail" that blames disobedient women for men threatening to harm themselves or others.

Durbin recounted that NCAA President Charlie Baker, the former GOP governor of Massachusetts, told a 2024 committee hearing there were fewer than 10 transgender athletes among a half-million in the NCAA, but the association doesn't do sex testing and Baker was sharing his own personal knowledge of publicly transgender athletes, Bock said.

Hawley claimed Baker "deliberately misled this committee" after an exchange with Bock about the "optionality" that Baker said the NCAA gives host institutions on locker rooms and accommodations. (The NCAA didn't answer a query about the claim.)

In practice, Bock said, optionality means female athletes avoid their own locker rooms to avoid male competitors. Jones referred to allegations by Gaines and a North Carolina State swimmer that several swimmers at the 2022 NCAA championships used closets to avoid Thomas in the women's locker room.