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.
“What Republicans are doing today is inventing a problem to stir up a culture war and divide people against each other and distract people from what they’re actually doing,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii. He called the bill “totally irrelevant to 99.9 percent of all people across the country.”
The measure was sponsored by Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama and a former high school girls basketball coach, who framed it as an example of how Democrats were out of touch with a mainstream point of view. On the Senate floor, G.O.P. lawmakers cited polls showing a majority of Americans, including most Democrats, believed that biological males should not be allowed to play women’s sports.
Many congressional Democrats have agreed that there are real concerns about transgender athletes competing in women’s sports at the highest levels. But they have argued that athletic associations should be making those decisions, not lawmakers passing broad bills at the federal level that lump together competitive athletes and young children who simply want to participate in school activities with their friends.
More than two dozen states already bar transgender athletes from participating in school sports, whether in K-12 schools or at the collegiate level.
On Monday, Senate Democrats argued that the legislation was not only an attack on basic human dignity, but also a waste of time. Of more than 500,000 N.C.A.A. athletes, they noted, fewer than 10 identified as transgender.
Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, also noted that the bill had no enforcement mechanism and “could subject women and girls to physical inspection by an adult if someone from an opposing team accused them of being transgender.”
Out of power and in the political wilderness, congressional Democrats have few levers to pull to stand in the way of the Republican governing trifecta. But the filibuster remains one of their final ways of blocking legislation that otherwise could make its way to Mr. Trump’s desk for his signature.
Earlier this year, Senate Democrats also blocked a measure that would subject some doctors who perform abortions to criminal penalties. They blocked a Republican bill to impose sanctions on officials affiliated with the International Criminal Court, which Republicans have wanted to rebuke for the decision of its top prosecutor to bring war crimes charges against top Israeli leaders for their military offensive against Hamas in Gaza.
