The U.S. Senate will vote on Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s bill to bar transgenderwomen and girls from competing in female school sports.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune placed the bill on the chamber’s calendar last week, meaning a vote will be held in the next few weeks, The Hill reports. A firm date for the vote has not been set.

The bill from Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, would stipulate that under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bans sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funds, “sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” Tuberville announced its reintroduction last week. He first introduced it in 2023.

The legislation, Senate Bill 9, additionally would make it a violation of Title IX “for a recipient of Federal funds who operates, sponsors, or facilitates athletic programs or activities to permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls.” It’s titled the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025.

A companion bill in the U.S. House of Representatives passed in 2023, and its sponsor, Republican Greg Steube of Florida, reintroduced it this year as part of the House Rules Package, and his colleagues have agreed to make it a priority. Tuberville’s 2023 bill never came to a vote in the Senate, which then had a Democratic majority. Now the House, the Senate, and the presidency — as of January 20 — will be under Republican control, so the legislation may well become law, although the House Republican majority is very slim. Donald Trumphas vowed to bar trans girls and women from female sports by executive order.

“With President Trump’s resounding victory last November, the American people sent a clear message to Washington that they want to protect and preserve the original purpose of Title IX,” Tuberville wrote recently in OutKick. “One of the primary reasons President Trump won in a landslide is because he ran on the issue of saving women’s sports. Seventy percent of Americans agree: men don’t belong in women’s sports or locker rooms.”

Polls have found that, but in reality, trans women athletes are a tiny minority. Charlie Baker, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, told a Senate committee in December that there are fewer than 10 trans athletes out of 510,000 in the thousand-plus NCAA schools. The number may include trans men as well as trans women; Baker didn’t specify. Still, it is tiny.

Also, scientific studies have indicated that trans women and girls don’t have the inherent advantage over cisgender females that anti-trans forces claim they have. Still, 26 states have adopted laws or regulations barring trans females — and in some cases trans males — from competing in school sports under their gender identity. Some of the bans apply only to K-12 public schools, some to state-funded colleges and universities as well.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware, the first out trans person in Congress, has said she can’t understand why Republicans are making attacks on trans people a priority. “I’ve had conversations with colleagues about many of the bills that are coming before us, and certainly have heard from some colleagues who, like me, are mystified that this is a priority for a Republican conference that is entering a Republican trifecta, that this is an issue that they prioritize,” McBride recently told The Independent. “And it defies understanding, except for the fact that it’s a pretty obvious part of a politics of misdirection and distraction.”

Under President Biden’s administration, the Department of Education introduced but then withdrew a rule interpreting Title IX as applying to gender identity. It was likely to be overridden by the incoming Trump administration, in any case.