Heritage's Title IX report cites their studies. The scientists say it misread them.

A July 8 Heritage Foundation report arguing that Title IX has "evolved from a seemingly modest anti-discrimination statute into a powerful engine of feminist social engineering" builds part of its case on published physiology research whose authors say it was misread ^[1][2]. That matters because the same think tank has influenced several high-profile Trump administration policies, and the administration has already sought to roll back Title IX's protections and to bar transgender girls and women from sports ^[3][4].

The report's author, Scott Yenor, chair of Heritage's American Citizenship Initiative, suggests that women are biologically programmed not to take part in certain high-impact sports and that proportional equality in school sports is neither desirable nor backed by science ^[1][5]. He cites several papers, including one co-authored by Carlos Hernando Domingo of Spain's University of Jaume I, that he says show elite training can cause irregular menstrual cycles and infertility ^[6]. In an e-mail to Scientific American, Yenor wrote that a woman who fills her late teens and early twenties with elite competition "runs a not insubstantial risk of having compromised fertility for as much as a third of her fertility window," adding that men have much longer windows ^[7].

Hernando Domingo told Scientific American that this reading of the evidence is "remiss at best" ^[8]. High-performance sport may alter menstrual cycles, he said, but "this does not indicate damage to the female reproductive system," and cycles stabilize once athletes reduce or stop training ^[9][10]. He also made the point the report needs to avoid: all high-performance sport carries direct health risks, and injury and physiological or psychological disorders must be considered in any training program aimed at maximum performance, regardless of sex ^[11].

Mary Jane de Souza of Pennsylvania State University, whose work on female athletes' menstrual cycles is also cited, called the argument "selective," saying it emphasizes natural sex differences and the costs of proportionality "while giving comparatively little attention to the extensive historical discrimination that motivated Title IX and the measurable gains women have achieved because of it" ^[12][13]. Title IX dates to 1972 and bans sex discrimination in education, including sports ^[14].

The most useful tell is a term that does not appear in the report. Work by epidemiologist Traci Carson and others on what was called the female athlete triad examined how irregular cycles, low energy availability and lower bone mineral density affect women in high-intensity sport ^[15][16]. More recent research found male athletes suffer similar problems, which is why the condition was renamed Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, or RED-S ^[17]. Heritage does not mention RED-S ^[18]. So the asymmetry the argument requires, that the metabolic costs of hard training land on women in particular, rests on a framing the field itself relabeled to strip out the sex specificity ^[1].

Carson, an amateur competitive cyclist who has studied training's effects on fertility, called the report alarming and said her reaction was to think of "all the generations of young women that could potentially be affected by this" ^[19][20].

Two of the researchers Yenor cites are now on record saying he used their work wrongly ^[2]. Worth watching: whether Yenor's citations are reproduced in agency rulemaking documents, where a contested reading becomes a legal record; whether the fertility-window figure, which Yenor supplied in an e-mail rather than drawing from the cited literature, is ever sourced; and whether Heritage's parallel push to overhaul scientific funding, which critics say would politicize research, changes who is available to check citations like these ^[3][21].