Sherry Boschert is the author of “37 Words: Title IX and Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination.” She lives in Lebanon.

Republicans in the state House of Representatives recently narrowly passed a bill targeting transgender kids on a party-line vote. Sponsors claim that we need House Bill 1205 in order to protect girls and women who want to play sports in school and to protect Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The bill now goes to the Senate.

Here’s the problem — their claims don’t add up and don’t match the history of Title IX. Meanwhile, they continue to ignore longstanding and well-known discrimination in our schools and colleges that unfairly give lots more money and playing opportunities to boys and men that should be going to girls and women. Pretending to care about women by demonizing a handful of transgender kids while ignoring the immense and illegal imbalances between men’s and women’s athletic programs is just that, pretending to care. It’s an election year, after all. It seems that Republicans have ginned up this distraction to camouflage their tolerance of widespread discrimination against girls and women.

It’s easy to see the extent of the athletic imbalances in colleges by going to the federal Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act database (EADA). For high schools, look at the website of Champion Women, a legal nonprofit that did a major public service by crunching raw data supplied by U.S. high schools for their athletic programs.

How big is the real problem? Let’s look at just three examples related to the three Republican senators who sponsored HB 1205 along with nine Republican state representatives.

Sen. William Gannon is a graduate of Saint Anselm College in Manchester, where women are 61% of students but get only 40% of the playing positions in sports. While men are only 39% of students, they get 50% of athletic scholarship aid and a whopping 80% of the athletics recruiting budget. Saint Anselm is depriving 107 women athletes of a chance to play. The college redirects $430,439 in student aid from women to men and shortchanges the recruiting budget for women’s athletics by $33,337, according to the most recent data on the EADA. Have you ever heard Sen. Gannon say peep about protecting women against this flagrant discrimination?

Sen. Ruth Ward’s district includes the town of Stoddard, where teenagers attend Keene High School and the closest college is Keene State College. The high school needs to add 17 playing positions for girls to match their share of enrollment. The college owes the women’s athletics program $2,892 for recruiting that it uses to recruit men instead. If Sen. Ward didn’t know about this, she does now. Will she act?

Sen. Howard Pearl lives in Loudon, whose high schoolers go to Merrimack Valley High School. The school is depriving 33 girls of the chances to play sports that would be available to them if administrators divvied up athletics opportunities fairly by share of enrollment. I wonder if this run-of-the-mill discrimination is demon enough for Sen. Pearl to do something about it. I suspect he’ll continue to pick on the few transgender kids that are out there because that grabs headlines.

Our flagship public institution of higher education, the University of New Hampshire, shunts 23 playing positions that should be for women over to the men’s athletics program. UNH shortchanges women $635,355 in athletic scholarship aid and $61,863 in recruitment funding. Hello, New Hampshire Republicans who claim to champion women.

Look at virtually any high school, college or university in the country and you’ll find similar imbalances. In fact, Champion Women estimates that U.S. high schools as a whole need to add 539,958 playing positions for girls to match their enrollment. U.S. colleges and universities are robbing women athletes of more than a billion dollars in athletic aid: $1,092,028,197.

That’s not chump change. But we may be chumps if we accept Republicans’ stories and allow them to ignore all of this while fear-mongering about a few transgender students.

I spent six years researching the history of Title IX for a book. Here’s the bottom line: Title IX is about inclusion, not exclusion. Every student deserves a chance to experience the benefits of sports: teamwork, how to train toward a goal, the thrill of winning, and learning to handle defeat gracefully. When we bar one group of people from any aspect of education like in HB 1205, that doesn’t “protect” Title IX. It diminishes it, and the bill probably won’t hold up in the inevitable court challenges.