(LifeSiteNews) — The Missouri House of Representatives has passed a bill removing the expiration date for a law banning the participation of gender-confused individuals in youth sports in public and private schools up through college.
In 2023, Missouri passed a law barring so-called “transgender” students from competing in school athletics. In order to get the proposed bill across the finish line, Republican supporters of the bill struck a compromise with Democrats, setting a four-year expiration date of August 28, 2027.
The measure, House Bill 1663 (HB 1663), passed the House 98-37 and now moves to the state Senate for consideration.
“When scientific biological differences between the sexes are ignored or not taken into consideration, women and girls suffer and become less than, rather than equal,” said Rep. Brian Seitz, the bill’s sponsor. “Years of training, practice and hope are extinguished as biological men or boys take the hard-earned medals or placement of our daughters, sisters, granddaughters and nieces.”
“To date, twenty-six (other) states have enacted policies to protect equal athletic opportunities for women and girls,” Seitz said. “All we’re doing is removing a sunset from (the) Missouri statute.”
Seitz cited the updated policy of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which quickly banned gender-confused males from competing in women’s sports after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in February 2025 threatening to withhold funding from schools that continue to allow males to compete against females.
While Democrats in the Missouri House argued against removing the expiration date in order to provide more time to study the matter, the NCAA — and more than half the nation’s other state governments — have found agreement in protecting girls from being forced to unfairly compete against males.
“If we erode sex-based protections in athletics, we do not expand opportunities,” Republican state Rep. Cathy Jo Loy noted. “We would collapse the very category that allowed generations of women to compete fairly.”
