After Trans Athlete Bans, Heritage Foundation Sets Its Sights On Dismantling Title IX

The Heritage Foundation report argues Title IX rollbacks are needed to preserve girls’ “fertility.”

Heritage Foundation // US Department of State

In light of recent anti-trans athlete rulings from the Supreme Court, a senior member of the Heritage Foundation is imagining a future that looks a lot like the past: one where a key provision of Title IX, a foundational law preserving gender equality, is gutted; one where women in sports and in academia are sidelined in deference to men; one where trans people don’t exist at all.

Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity is authored by Boise State University professor Dr. Scott Yenor. Relying on sexist stereotypes, it calls for the government to let some schools dismantle competitive women’s athletics, which is already comparatively underresourced, and let women funnel into more “feminine” physical activities, like yoga, hiking clubs, and team cheerleading (not to be confused with Stunt, the competitive cheerleading-adjacent sport that gained full NCAA championship status just this year). Such activities don’t come with the scholarships and opportunities that elite sports do.

Experts have been sounding the alarm about this threat since the inception of Project 2025, the far-right’s political playbook spearheaded by the dark money of the Heritage Foundation. The same regressive notions about sex, gender, and biological essentialism weaponized against trans women athletes are being deployed against cisgender women, too.

Yenor is a senior research fellow at Heritage. In his spare time, he is a member of a secretive Christian nationalist group that’s paid homage to the Afrikaner nationalist movement—white supremacists of apartheid-era South Africa, The Guardian reports.

At the National Conservatism Conference in 2021, Yenor said in no uncertain terms that women ought to be relegated to the home and be subordinate to men. “Yenor detailed what he sees as the ‘evils’ of feminism, labeled ‘independent women’ as ‘medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome’ and decried colleges and universities as ‘the citadels of our gynecocracy,’” The Associated Press reports.

As per the AP, he continued, “If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers [...] not finding every reason for young women to delay motherhood until they are established in a career or sufficiently independent.”

Efforts to recruit more women into fields like engineering, medicine and law should be replaced with efforts to recruit more men, Yenor said. “If every Nobel Prize winner is a man, that’s not a failure. It’s kind of a cause for celebration.”

With these comments in mind, Yenor’s report—already dripping with contempt for women’s rights—takes on an even more ominous tone. He describes Title IX as “a powerful engine of feminist social engineering,” arguing that (cisgender) women’s ambition, competitive drive, career aspirations, and independence are an affront to “the destiny written in her sex or biology.” What women really need, in his telling, is preparation for homemaking and child-rearing.

“The current Title IX regime as applied to sports (and elsewhere) is part of a sustained social engineering effort that is designed to produce a new sort of woman—one that is more aggressive, more competitive, more male, less relational, and less oriented toward the goods of family and motherhood,” Yenor writes, denouncing the “nature-denying extremism” and “coercion of America’s Title IX enforcement regime.” He laments the potential of competitive sports to cause “menstrual disruption” in student athletes and praises more “moderate” activities because it “assists fertility” of cisgender girls.

CAPTION: An excerpt from Scott Yenor’s most recent report for The Heritage Foundation.

“This is only the most recent evidence that legal theories that rely on anti-trans talking points are carefully crafted to undermine civil rights protections generally,” Zane McNeill, a legal fellow at Lawyers for Good Government, told Erin in the Morning. “Although some of its arguments may seem far-fetched, the theories espoused by the Heritage Foundation have a tendency to show up in federal policy. For instance, the Heritage Foundation was one of the main organizations behind the conservative policy blueprint, Project 2025, which has now been more than 50 percent implemented by the Trump administration.”

The crux of Yenor’s report focused on one aspect of Title IX in particular: “proportionality mandates,” as he puts it. It’s a prong of a Title IX test of legal compliance that stipulates opportunities for women athletes should be proportionate to the number of women on campus. For example, if 60% of students on campus are women, then roughly 60% of that school’s potential roster for competitive athletics should be women, too. In other words, it’s not a required quota; it’s a push for equal opportunity and equal funding. And it’s not even universally binding, as the proportionality test is just one metric that can be used to evaluate a school’s Title IX compliance. It is, however, the most common.

Yenor’s proposal would undo decades of progress and take a more hands-off approach to women’s rights in sports. It would pave the way for sex stereotypes to manifest to preserve his proclaimed “humane social order.” If it materializes, Yenor’s plan could let schools replace elite women’s sports and competitions—including the prestige, potential income, and scholarships that come with them—with yoga classes and exercise clubs. In Yenor’s mind, women simply don’t possess the same desire for competition and contact sports as their male peers.

Further, the Yenor plan would carve out exceptions to Title IX data collection when it comes to “major revenue producing male sports”—most notably football, which journalist Katelyn Burns notes takes up a hugely disproportionate amount of competitive spots for men’s college teams.

The fact that there are fewer opportunities for elite women athletes is simply something to let be, Yenor argues; it is largely natural.

But experts, including those who wrote and passed this law decades ago, know that’s just not true. “The drafters recognized that the low participation of women in sports at the time of Title IX enactment was not because there was no interest. It was because they weren’t given opportunity,” said Shiwali Patel, the Senior Director of Education Justice at the National Women’s Law Center.

“Once you give them that opportunity, the interest develops, because then they can see what it’s like to play sports, develop those skills, and be in those spaces,” Patel told Erin in the Morning. “It’s mutually reinforcing in that way—the more you create that opportunity, the more interest you’ll see.”

Meanwhile, in Yenor’s eyes, while women’s supposed athletic inferiority is biological “destiny” not to be tampered with, gender disparities that disfavor boys necessitate outside intervention: Men are falling behind women when it comes to college enrollment and academic achievement, and Yenor blames, in part, gender equality laws. He argues that women’s athletic success is taking away resources that could be given to men’s teams, thereby stifling men’s access to college education.

“Reducing real male athletic opportunities at the very moment young men are falling behind in higher education has created many harms downstream,” he writes. “Restoring a healthier balance involves protecting and even expanding men’s sports while allowing natural variation in program offerings. Such a balanced approach could help to draw more young men to college. Addressing the growing boy crisis in education is not incidental to the health of our institutions or our families; it is central to the recovery of a flourishing citizenry.”

Dr. Anima Adjepong, the Department Head of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, put it simply: “It’s incredibly sexist,” they said.

Even some Democrats have adopted this harmful rhetoric. Ohio’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate for the 2026 elections, Amy Acton, became the latest on the left to turn on trans children, referring to transgender girls as “boys playing in girls’ sports” and saying she disagreed with it on the grounds of “kids’ health and safety.” She joins the ranks of Congressman Seth Moulton from Massachusetts, Congressman Tom Suozzi of New York, and California Governor Gavin Newsom on that front.

“The attack on trans women in sports was only a step and a broader attack on women,” Adjepong told Erin in the Morning. “It’s important to always remember that when we’re pushing back.”

You can read the full report from Yenor here.