‘War on Gender’: GOP Lawmakers Forge Game Plan to Protect Children From Transgender Ideology

Republican lawmakers laid out their game plan to purge transgender ideology from American society at a Wednesday panel discussion.

Republicans will soon introduce the STOP Act, or the Safeguarding the Overall Protection of Minors Act, to prohibit transgender medical interventions for children, said Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan.

“Everybody changes after you get your hormones,” Marshall said. “It’s biologically, it’s physiologically, very obvious to everybody. It is just sad that we’re doing these irreversible procedures and so many of these hormones.”

Marshall also introduced the Defining Male and Female Act shortly before the panel to codify legal definitions of the sexes based on biology.

“Ultimately, people that are saying that God is wrong, that the sex we were given, that God must have been wrong on this, and if you would just change your sex, it would solve all your problems,” he said.

The Defining Male and Female Act combats the Biden-Harris administration’s Title IX rule change, which adds “gender identity” to the list of sex-based protections, allowing males to share female spaces and participate in girls and women’s sports.

Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., introduced a companion bill in the House at the end of July to establish in federal law that there are only two sexes: male and female.

She spoke on the panel alongside GOP Senate colleagues Marshall and Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, as well as American Principles Project President Terry Schilling, former collegiate athlete Paula Scanlan, and Heritage Foundation legal scholar Sarah Parshall Perry.

Miller told The Daily Signal that defining biological sex is “a primary priority” because “it’s foundational to how we’re going to operate” and if America is going to “dwell in reality.”

“We now have the trifecta,” she said in an interview after the panel. “We’ve got a majority in the House, the Senate, and we’ve got President Trump at the helm, and we are standing up for common sense. We’re standing up for reality.”

The Defining Male and Female Act would acknowledge the legal right of women to have their own spaces and sports, separate from biological males.

Scanlan, legislative liaison at the Independent Women’s Forum and ambassador at Independent Women’s Voice, told The Daily Signal that people are realizing men are men and women are women. A onetime collegiate swimming teammate of Lia—formerly known as William—Thomas at the University of Pennsylvania, Scanlan said she was forced to change clothes in front of a biological male around 18 times per week.

“It would be great if, federally, they could pass something that says men should not play women’s sports, but on a deeper level, codifying the term ‘woman’ into law,” she said.

She said women deserve their own restrooms and their own sports for “women’s safety.”

Tuberville addressed what he calls “the war against gender.”

“I’m an American, and if you’re an American, I’m 100% for you,” he said, “but being American does not give you an opportunity to push other people’s rights. You cannot infringe on people’s rights. You take your rights and you go with biological men. Playing women’s sports is not a right. It is a political statement by the Left.”

When men are allowed in women’s private spaces, women are vulnerable, Miller said.

“I have a lot of daughters and granddaughters, and I don’t feel like they’re safe if men can enter the women’s bathrooms,” Miller told The Daily Signal. “It just opens the door for any man, any pervert, any violent man that wants access to a vulnerable woman, and that’s what we are.”