Senate Democrats betrayed women and girls, including their own constituents, on Monday. Despite overwhelming public support for female-only sports and locker rooms, including among registered Democrats, not a single Democrat voted for the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.

This eminently sensible and straightforward piece of legislation would have defined the word “sex” accurately in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and prohibited male athletes from competing in female-only athletics at educational institutions funded under Title IX. It passed in the House of Representatives in 2023 but did not advance in the Senate that year.

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It passed again in the House of Representatives in January of this year, with two Democrats in support, and came to a cloture vote in the Senate on Monday. Not a single Senate Democrat voted yes, and the bill failed to obtain the necessary number of votes to advance. 

I am a radical feminist, a Democrat, and a TERF, an acronym that used to stand for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” but now means any woman on the Left who knows that sex is real and is not afraid to say so. I have been speaking out about this issue for 10 years. In 2019, I was essentially forced to resign from my job, effectively ending a nearly 20-year career in criminal law and justice because I say out loud that women and girls exist as a sex class, a class that does not include men who claim to have female gender identities.

Men are male and women are female, regardless of any claimed identity, and there are Democrats all over this country who understand this to be true. Yet, for years, most media outlets have refused to acknowledge that fact. The Democratic Party actively denies it. 

On the day the bill passed in 2023, I published an article with the Washington Examiner titled, “Why progressives should support the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” where I explained why the Democrats should support it. I explained that I hear every day from rank-and-file Democrats, some more progressive, others more moderate, who are appalled at what the Democratic Party is doing to women’s rights at the altar of gender ideology.

Not a single Democrat voted yes on that day in 2023, and the bill did not advance in the Senate. This time, it did, and Senate Democrats had an opportunity to demonstrate to voters across the political spectrum that they care about women and girls as a sex class. Shamefully, they failed to do so.

In 2023, my evidence that Democratic voters support female-only sports was anecdotal. But now we have data to back it up. In January, polling was released by the New York Times and Ipsos showing that 79% of voters (including 67% of Democrats and 64% of independents) support this sensible approach. And we know from post-election polling that one reason former Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election was that she was “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”

Elected Democrats aren’t trying to decimate women’s rights because they don’t know any better. In the past few weeks, the following Democratic and independent senators either ignored or declined requests from constituent Democrats or former Democrats to discuss the bill: Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), John Fetterman (D-PA), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Andy Kim (D-NJ), Angus King (I-ME), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Gary Peters (D-MI), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), and Mark Warner (D-VA). 

Each constituent’s meeting request noted that tennis champion and registered Democrat Martina Navratilova was willing to join the meeting virtually. Each of these senators passed up an opportunity to meet with his or her own constituents (many of them female athletes) and one of the greatest female athletes of all time.

On Feb. 20 and Feb. 21, I was joined by Australian women’s rights activists Sall Grover and Kath Deves at the Capitol. Between those two days, we visited every single Senate Democratic office to explain why it’s important to vote yes on the bill. Some offices took our materials politely; others offered a frosty reception. No office followed up.

This is a pathetic performance from the party that claims to stand for women and defend our democracy. It’s insulting to the countless female Democrats who voted these senators into office, and to Democrats all over the country who care about the sex-based rights of women and girls. 

Voting to remove female athletes’ rights to fair competition, opportunities for achievement, physical safety, and bodily privacy is repugnant. Doing so while ignoring their own Democratic constituents’ opposition shows us exactly what they think of American women and girls and the democratic process. It’s a slap in the face to all American women and girls and to their own voters. 

In 2023, I published the book The Reckoning: How the Democrats Betrayed Women and Girls. It was meant to serve partly as a warning to Democratic Party leaders of what was likely to happen in November 2024 if they did not reverse course. They did not.

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I was watching a football game when I first saw a “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” commercial last fall. I nearly fell out of my chair. I thought, “That’s it; it’s over.” And it was.

And now, the Democrats in the Senate have betrayed women and girls again. Democrats need to do better or get used to losing. Women won’t forget.

Kara Dansky is the author of The Abolition of Sex and The Reckoning. She is the president of the nonpartisan nonprofit organization Women’s Declaration International USA.