They Ran Away From Women’s Sports. Not a Single Question Asked.

On Wednesday morning, three witnesses sat at a table in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Kim Jones co-founded the Independent Council on Women’s Sports. Carly Smolak played professional soccer until the sport shifted around her. William Bock III has litigated women’s sports eligibility cases for years. The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Standing Up for Women in Sports: Ensuring Opportunity, Fairness and Safety for Female Athletes, was officially underway.

Not one Senate Democrat stayed to ask them anything.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) opened by calling the hearing a “vendetta against a small number of people in the trans community,” said he wouldn’t treat it as “a responsible exercise of this committee,” and left before witnesses were sworn in. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) appeared briefly and said nothing. Every other Democrat simply didn’t show. Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) called it “absolutely absurd.” That’s probably too generous.

I’ve coached youth sports for more than a decade. I know what it looks like when a young woman earns a roster spot. What happened Wednesday wasn’t complicated. Democrats made a calculation: they can’t defend their position in front of actual female athletes, so they won’t.

Here is what they chose not to defend.

Title IX turns 54 this year. Before it passed in 1972, fewer than 30,000 women competed in college athletics; today that number exceeds 200,000. Scholarships, roster spots, records, and program funding: all of it rests on a protected female category. That category holds meaning only if “female” does.

Smolak testified that “we are failing young female athletes, ” and science backs her up. A peer-reviewed study in Sports Medicine found that transgender women retain a 17 percent grip strength advantage after hormone therapy and that muscular advantages are “only minimally reduced” after testosterone suppression. A separate study confirmed the edge persists beyond a full year of treatment. Lost roster spots, forfeited scholarships, records that no longer reflect female achievement. That’s not hypothetical.

The question was direct: what do we owe the girls who trained for years on the premise that Title IX meant something?

Senate Democrats aren’t new to this disappearing act. In January 2025, the House passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, amending Title IX to define athletic eligibility based on reproductive biology at birth, with federal funding as the enforcement lever. Two months later, Senate Democrats killed it on a cloture vote. Every Democrat voted no to protecting girls. Wednesday was another opening. They again chose not to take it.

Sen. Chairman Grassley (R-IA) noted that Democrats “called no witnesses and asked no questions.” Durbin called it a “vendetta.” By that standard, every oversight hearing on contested policy qualifies.

President Trump signed an executive order in February 2025 directing agencies to apply Title IX with sex-based athletic categories, backed by federal funding enforcement. Unfortunately, the next administration can reverse it on day one, and courts are already testing it. A statute holds. That’s why Grassley and witness William Bock pressed for legislation. The Protect College Sports Act advanced in the Senate 74 to 24, proof the coalition is there when senators decide to show up.

One point belongs on the record.

Transgender young people face documented mental health pressures, and they matter. The inclusion argument deserves consideration of another category to compete. But Jones, Smolak, and Bock were at that table ready for exactly that debate. If the case for inclusion is strong enough to justify displacing biological females from the category Title IX built for them, it ought to survive cross-examination. Senate Democrats decided it shouldn’t have to.

Title IX was signed by Richard Nixon, with bipartisan support, because protecting women’s athletic opportunity was something both parties could stand behind. The young women competing today earned their places under those rules. They didn’t ask for this fight. They deserve senators willing to have it.

The hearing room was open Wednesday morning. The witness table was set. A boycott doesn’t resolve the question. It just announces that you’ve stopped trying to answer it.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.

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