'Telling': Columnist flags 'federal law' Republicans have made their 'first priority'

While Republicans work to pass the one "big, beautiful bill" that contains President-elect Donald Trump's biggest priorities — immigration, energy, and the economy — as he prepares to take office in two weeks, the party hasn't discussed its "first priority" nearly as much as the others, according to journalist Katelynn Burns.

"The first priority in the rules package House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., unveiled last week was banning trans people from sports," Burns writes. "The bill, which will be heard in the House now that the rules package has passed, seeks to define sex under Title IX for sports participation as defined at birth," she continued. "This follows a yearslong moral panic over a small handful of trans athletes who found mostly middling success at lower levels of competitive collegiate athletics."

One of the reasons the GOP is so concerned about ejecting trans women from sports "when there are almost no trans women in sports", Burns — who was "the first openly transgender Capitol Hill reporter in U.S. history" — suggests, is that "a recent poll shows public support for a ban on trans women in women’s sports at 66%."

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She writes:

By making this the first vote newly elected Democrats have to make, he can reinforce the Trump campaign attack ads that accused Democrats of caring more about trans people than the average working family, even though the vast majority of trans people are working-class.

But making Democrats look bad by defending trans women — or look bad by not defending trans women — isn’t Republicans’ goal here. The goal of targeting trans women’s participation in sports is to create a federal law that declares trans women are men.

If the party can complete that step, Burns submits, "then the laws can become more restrictive until it’s no longer legally viable to exist as a trans person under federal law."

The Speaker "and the rest of the House GOP’s taking their first votes as newly elected representatives to ban the 10 or so trans athletes competing in college sports and the couple of handfuls playing high school sports," Burns emphasizes, "rather than securing the border that they falsely describe as 'open' or cutting the cost of living or doing anything about the economy, is telling."

Burns' full op-ed is available here.