Three GOP Senators Move to Stop College Sports Bill From Wiping Out State Trans Athlete Bans

Three Republican senators filed an amendment Thursday to stop a major college sports bill from accidentally wiping out state laws banning biological males from women's athletics.

Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Jim Banks of Indiana and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama want to close what they call a loophole in the Protect College Sports Act, according to Fox News and a statement from Hawley's Senate office.

The Protect College Sports Act is a bipartisan effort to set national rules for name, image and likeness compensation and athlete eligibility, an area where states have passed a patchwork of conflicting laws since the NCAA lost control of NIL rules in 2021. As written, the bill includes a federal preemption provision that would override certain state laws governing college athlete eligibility.

Hawley says that provision goes too far. He flagged the issue publicly on Wednesday, writing on X that he had reviewed the current draft of the Senate NIL bill and was "very concerned it PREEMPTS Missouri's law banning men in women's sports." He credited former college swimmer and women's sports advocate Riley Gaines for raising the alarm first, writing "this is what @Riley_Gaines_ has been saying. Big, big problem."

The amendment the three senators filed would add explicit language stating the bill's preemption clause does not apply to any state or local law that "prohibits biological men from playing in women's sports." In plain terms, it's an insurance policy making sure state-level bans, like the ones on the books in Missouri and Indiana, survive even if the broader college sports bill becomes federal law.

"Biological men should never be allowed in women's sports or women's locker rooms," Hawley said in a statement. "We've got to make sure state laws protecting women stand."

Banks, who has three daughters, said Indiana's law is among the strongest in the country and he won't back a bill that guts it. "As the father of three daughters, I can't support any legislation that would preempt Indiana's law," Banks said, according to his office.

Tuberville was the most combative of the three. "Protecting girls and women's sports is the civil rights issue of our time," he said. "Democrats have proven again and again they don't give a rip about protecting women from mentally ill men who wake up one day and decide to dress up like a girl."

This fight is happening against a legal backdrop that already favors the senators' position at the Supreme Court level. The Court has upheld state laws in Idaho and West Virginia banning biological males from girls' sports, according to Fox News. Constitutional law analysts including Jonathan Turley have noted the rulings reflect the view that transgender status isn't a protected class the way race or religion are, leaving the policy question to individual states. That precedent is exactly why Hawley, Banks and Tuberville are worried about a federal statute stepping on state authority they believe the Court has already recognized.

The broader context matters here too. NIL chaos has been building since 2021, when the NCAA's old amateurism rules collapsed under legal pressure and states rushed in with their own, often conflicting, laws. Congress has spent years trying to write a single federal standard so schools and athletes aren't navigating 50 different rulebooks. That's a legitimate problem the Protect College Sports Act is trying to solve. The concern from Hawley's camp isn't that a national NIL standard is a bad idea, it's that the current draft's preemption language is broad enough to catch sex-eligibility laws in its net, possibly as an unintended side effect of drafting rather than a deliberate policy choice.

Neither of the available sources includes an on-record response from the bill's authors or from Democratic senators explaining whether they view the preemption language the same way Hawley does, or whether they'd accept the carve-out amendment without objection. Whether the amendment gets a vote, gets folded into the base bill, or gets stripped out in committee negotiations will determine whether this loophole concern was resolved quietly or becomes a floor fight.