Democrats on Monday blocked a Republican-written bill aimed at barring transgender women and girls from school sports teams designated for female students, thwarting consideration in the Senate of the G.O.P.’s latest move to use transgender people as leverage at the dawn of President Trump’s second term.
With Democrats opposed, the measure stalled on a vote of 51 to 45, falling short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster and be brought up for consideration. The bill, which passed the House in January on a largely party-line vote, would prohibit federal funding from going to K-12 schools that include transgender students in women’s and girls’ athletic programs.
It mirrors one of the goals of an executive order Mr. Trump signed last month titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which charged the Education Department with changing its interpretation of civil rights laws so that schools that failed to bar transgender athletes could lose federal funding.
Senate Republicans argued it was essential to protecting girls from predatory men encroaching on their private spaces and seeking to gain an unfair athletic advantage on the basis of sex, even as they hinted that the measure was intended to lay a political trap for Democrats.
“Democrats can stand for women or stand with a radical transgender ideology,” Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, said on Monday. If they opposed the legislation, he said, “they’ll have to answer to the women and girls they vote to disenfranchise.”
Democrats denounced the legislation as a craven effort by Republicans to wring political advantage from a small but vulnerable population of transgender children that would ultimately put at risk the girls it purported to protect.