Within a few weeks of the country's highest court giving states permission to ban trans girls from nearly all school sports, the influential right wing think tank The Heritage Foundation made clear its newest target: The rest of girls' and women's sports. Specifically, as laid out in a lengthy position paper, Heritage believes that women's sports are, in general, not womanly enough.

What do they want? The paper, authored by Boise State professor Scott Yenor—who once called career-oriented women "medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome"—proclaims that Title IX has pushed girls' and women's sports to become more aggressive, against the nature of most women. Specifically, the paper says, these "male-normed" women's sports are not "celebrating distinctly feminine virtues of service, grace, and character."

Why should you care? There is no denying Heritage's power in shaping Republican politics and what Donald Trump is likely to do; it's the foundation that published Project 2025 and actively campaigned for trans bans in sports. Trump denied knowing about Project 2025, only to enact its recommendations once he took office. Whatever Heritage says it wants, there's a good chance this administration's actions will follow.

So the July 8th publication of the paper on its website seems like a real signal of what's to come. I first noticed it thanks to people posting about it on Bluesky. If you caught clips online of soccer legend Megan Rapinoe recently talking about attacks on women's sports, this paper is part of what she is referencing.

And the document does outline exactly how and why the next step needs to be a full-on feminization of women's sports. It even calls Title IX, the federal law that made the United States a global leader in women's sports, a "failed experiment."

Yenor's writing does not exactly call for the all-out rollback of the landmark civil rights law, or of all women's varsity sports. Instead, it outlines a different plan of attack: Making it so that, while still on the books, Title IX is almost completely toothless and meaningless. It will give girls and women rights, but on paper only.

First, a bit of background because, as tends to happen when discussing civil liberties, things can get a bit wonky. Title IX is the federal law, passed in 1972, that clearly states no person can be discriminated against in any way in education based on their sex. It is remarkably straightforward.

It worked, and until recently most people didn't think about the law at all, perhaps taking for granted that women will have equal access to education, and that includes classrooms, extracurricular activities, and athletics. In sports alone, you can draw a direct line from Title IX to the U.S. Women's National Team soccer dominance, the popularity of Women's March Madness, and why U.S. women succeed in so many Olympic sports.

The Trump administration has been dismantling various aspects of the civil rights law for years now. During his first term, the U.S. Department of Education narrowed the types of sexual harassment and misconduct schools were required to investigate. More recently, the gutting of the Education Department, which had enforced the law for decades across both Democratic and Republican presidencies, helped turned the landmark legislation into little more than a cudgel for the administration to wield against whatever it deems politically expedient.

For years, that target was trans girls and women. The current Education Department's own press release detailing its latest in Title IX enforcement lists only one type of case—those brought against school districts that allowed trans girls to play girls' sports. Access to sports teams? Concerns about equal time to practice and play? Questions about coaching opportunities for women in women's sports? You won't find any of that under wrestling impresario-turned-education boss Linda MacMahon's leadership.

(There is no evidence of the Education Department being inundated with complaints about trans girls in sports before Trump took office. Former employees consistently said—and a data analysis by ProPublica showed—that more than 80 percent of complaints made to civil rights investigators were about harassment, racial discrimination, and unequal access for students with disabilities.)

That campaign against trans girls culminated earlier this summer when the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3—the three votes against all coming from the court's liberal bloc—to allow states to ban trans girls from school sports. MacMahon's Education Department put out a press release calling it a big victory that remedied a way in which Title IX had been "distorted" to subject "women to immeasurable harm."

When Heritage brought on Yenor last year, The Atlantic described his hire as one that "poses serious questions about the institution’s beliefs concerning the equality of women in the workplace and perhaps even as citizens."

Yenor is providing those answers.

It's not that Yenor is in denial about the successes of Title IX. Rather, his paper seeks to reframe the triumphs of Title IX—women in sports, women in leadership, women with their own careers, women with autonomy—as failures. To hear Yenor tell it, second-wave feminism, inspired by the influential French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir, took up the wrongheaded idea that women should be more assertive and less graceful. Those feminists then made this manifest through sports.

Yenor finds a hero in the founder of the modern Olympic Games, the French baron Pierre de Coubertin, who until his dying day fought to keep women out of global competition except in a handful of sports that he deemed womanly enough, such as tennis and sailing, which were associated with wealth and could be done in skirts.

Now, 130 years after de Coubertin launched the modern Olympics, Yenor mounts a strikingly similar argument. He writes: "By cultivating daring, risk-taking, physical dominance, and a desire for victory, athletics would prepare women for careers, leadership, and independence rather than homemaking and motherhood."

In other words, expanding the possibilities for women is a bad thing.

How will this dismantling happen? The paper explains how Heritage wants it to go. A lot of Title IX's power comes from the question of what equality looks like. Since 1979, on the matter of women's sports, the Education Department had followed a three-part test:

• Are the opportunities for male and female students to participate in sports proportionate to enrollment or
• Can the school show they are still working to expand their offerings for women or
• Can the school show they have accommodated all the interest that exists for girls' and women's sports.

Proportionality is very important in Title IX, and schools are encouraged to offer women's teams that align with their varsity men's teams. A recreational yoga class doesn't count toward Title IX. Neither does a dance class.

Yenor describes this as a grave mistake because, due to biology, women really want to do more yoga and dancing and less rugby and wrestling. If women wanted to do more sports, he argues, we simply would have done them by now. He also suggests that enough reparations to women already have been made, throwing out the idea that perhaps "the country had done enough to compensate girls for past discrimination."

If anything, the problem is that Title IX is now redirecting resources that are critical for men—because, he writes, "competition is much more central to male identity"—toward women. In doing so, the law harms men because "competitive drive and male friendship have suffered under the weaponized application of Title IX."

The path Yenor lays out toward the further dismantling of Title IX is remarkably simple: Let more activities count toward fulfilling the law. Fitness classes? They should count. Yoga? It should count. Recreational intramurals? Sure. A hiking club? That too. Yenor even suggests shutting down what he calls "niche varsity sports" in favor of "broader wellness programming" because those will be more popular.

It's not that women's sports would cease to exist under that kind of regime. There still will be (most likely) UConn women's basketball, Nebraska women's volleyball, and Oklahoma softball. But while industry leading programs that generate real revenue for their institutions will carry on thanks to the support of their local communities, more precarious women's programs would not. The women's wrestling team—college women's wrestling is growing significantly—might be replaced with a hiking group, and those athletes won't have a legal mechanism to stop it from happening. The document does not directly say that there will also be fewer athletic scholarships available for women in this future, but that loss is strongly implied. As with abortion, a young girl's access to sports could be limited or decided outright by her location or income bracket.

You could call what Yenor lays out a return to Coubertin-ism: To make sports girly again. If Yenor—and, given that they published the paper, Heritage—gets their way, that vision will become the law of the land.

It's worth noting that Coubertin-ism has already failed. The Olympics are now the largest stage for women's sports in the world. But that reversal occurred not due to some change of heart by leadership but because of the work done by female athletes and advocates—chief among them Alice Milliat who, full disclosure, I am writing a book about—to force their way into competition. They saw the power to be had and they seized it.

As Rapinoe said recently, there is a reason people fight to take control of women's sports. "They don't like women in sports," she said, "because it helps us with confidence and power."