A Federal Threat to Women’s Sports in South Carolina

Protecting women’s and girls’ sports is something we fought hard for here in South Carolina. Former State Representative Ashley Trantham (R-Greenville) was a legislative champion in authoring and promoting the passage of the Save Women’s Sports Act.

Passing the bill wasn’t easy—but Trantham and grassroots leaders throughout the Palmetto State persisted, and Governor Henry McMaster signed the bill into law in May 2022.

Recently, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) introduced S. 4668, the Protect College Sports Act, which creates national federal standards for name, image, and likeness (NIL) agreements, athlete transfers, and eligibility rules in college athletics. Unfortunately, the wording of this unrelated bill could imperil the Save Women’s Sports Act in South Carolina and similar legislation enacted in 26 other states.

The bill was proposed to address NIL deals and transfer rules. But buried in the text, Section 113 sets out eligibility rules for college athletes, and Section 121 bars states from enacting or maintaining any law relating to eligibility under Section 113. That combination is written so loosely that activist judges could use it to strike down the very state laws that keep men out of women's sports.

We've seen this playbook before. The American Civil Liberties Union convinced lower courts that Title IX banned women's sports protections until the Supreme Court unanimously shut that down this summer. This bill hands

activists a brand-new tool to try the same trick all over again, and this time it's written into federal law. Supporters of the bill keep saying, "Don't worry, that's not what it means." Maybe not. But we shouldn't have to trust judges, bureaucrats, or the National Collegiate Athletic Association, an organization that has fought women's sports protections for years, to read this bill the right way.

Alliance Defending Freedom is at the forefront of this issue in the states and in Washington, DC. They raised this exact concern, and their word carries real weight here. They've litigated women's sports cases across the country, all the way up to the United States Supreme Court, and won.

Palmetto Family Alliance deeply values their input, and the fact that they are genuinely worried about how this bill is written should tell you something. If the attorneys who have fought and won these battles in court are sounding the alarm, Congress needs to listen.

Grassroots organizations like ours have fought long and hard in the states to protect women’s sports. If this legislation is not fixed, the work of groups like Palmetto Family and grassroots organizations across the nation will have been for naught.

Women's sports and women's safety are too important to leave to chance. As this bill is being considered, we would ask Senators Tim Scott and Darline Graham not to let it pass as is. It needs to be fixed before it gets a vote, and if it isn’t fixed, both Scott and Graham should stand with pro-family organizations throughout South Carolina and vote no.

Citizens in South Carolina and 26 other states deserve to have their state’s “Save Women’s Sports Act” protected—rather than being potentially gutted through unintended consequences of an unrelated bill.