Conservative lawmakers’ bills aiming to curtail the rights of transgender students often claim to be doing so in order to “protect” girls and women. Judging those claims by what legislators do and not what they say can tell a different story.

Republicans in at least 18 states have passed laws banning transgender students from school sports. Legislatures defeated similar bills in at least 16 states, including Maine. In March, the Republican majority on the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee recommended H.R. 734 on a party-line vote for full consideration by the House – the so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023.

In athletics, at least, there is an easy way to tell if these legislators really care about “protecting” women athletes. It’s called the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA). Every U.S. college and university with athletics is required to submit yearly data to the government about their men’s and women’s athletics programs. Take a look at almost any EADA report and you’ll find blatant discrimination against women athletes that is a far bigger problem than anything to do with trans athletes. College and university athletics routinely violate Title IX, the 50-year-old civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. There is no EADA requirement for high schools yet, but it would likely show the same pattern.

What are legislators doing to protect girls and women from this widespread discrimination in higher education? Nothing, so far.

Let’s look at the most recent EADA, from 2021-2022, for one University of Maine System campus and one Maine college, for example. The University of Southern Maine EADA shows that women were 61% of its 3,525 undergraduates but only 46% of its athletes. That means the university denied 57 women athletes a chance to play and gave those opportunities to men. Women’s teams get a minority of the athletics spending budget. Athletics in educational institutions are supposed to be about just that – education. The educational experience of men is not so much more valuable than the educational experience of women to justify such lopsided favoritism.

The discrimination hits coaches, too. The University of Southern Maine hired more than twice as many men compared with women for coaching – 13 vs. five head coaches and 43 vs. 12 assistant coaches. To its credit, USM is an anomaly compared with most other colleges, in that it pays its women coaches slightly higher average salaries than the men get.

Private institutions aren’t any better. The most recent EADA for Bowdoin College shows women were 51% of undergraduates but 46% of athletes, meaning the college denied 34 women their chance to play. Bowdoin hired 19 men and nine women as head coaches, plus 32 men and 18 women assistant coaches, a favoritism that might have been tolerated in the 1970s and 1980s but doesn’t pass muster after 50 years of women thriving in athletics. And whether the assistant coaches were men or women, if they coached women’s teams they got paid an average 20% less than if they coached men’s teams.

This discrimination is happening in broad daylight, backed by data submitted by the colleges themselves and made available on the internet. They document that dozens of women athletes in these two schools – and thousands across the country – are getting the short end of the stick. Rather than address that, conservative lawmakers push bills to manufacture fear of a minuscule number of transgender athletes in a culture war that the politicians hope will bring them votes.

My message to legislators: If you really want to protect women athletes, show me new bills to even the playing field for men’s and women’s teams. Show me a law requiring equal financing and equal pay for men’s and women’s teams. Show me the money.

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