House Republicans’ efforts to exclude transgender women from the planned Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum are jeopardizing bipartisan support for the museum.

Last week, the Democratic Women’s Caucus and House Democratic Caucus sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R) urging him not to bring an amended version of H.R. 1329, the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum Act, to the House floor for a vote, the Advocate reports.

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According to the letter, the original version of H.R. 1329, introduced early last year, had bipartisan support, with 127 Democrats and 103 Republicans cosponsoring the bill.

In March, however, Republican members of the Committee on House Administration rewrote the bill, adding provisions that state only “biological women” may be featured in the museum. According to the letter, which was signed by 146 Democratic lawmakers, the amended bill also “grants President Donald Trump authority to unilaterally select the Women’s Museum site, hands control over design and construction to boards stacked with Trump’s political loyalists, and dictates what the museum can and cannot say about women’s history.”

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Republicans’ amended version of H.R. 1329 comes one year after the president issued an executive order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which directed Vice President J.D. Vance to oversee efforts to “remove improper ideology” from the federally funded Smithsonian museums. The order specifically cited the planned Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, which it claimed would celebrate “the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports.” It directed Vance and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russell Vought to work with Congress to ensure that the planned museum would “not recognize men as women in any respect.”

In their April 16 letter to Johnson, Democratic lawmakers say that the “biological women” provision is “clearly” intended to “target transgender women and girls,” but that it also “invites arbitrary enforcement and could be used to challenge the inclusion of any woman or girl a politician deems not ‘feminine’ enough.”

“This is just another example of Republicans needlessly adding an anti-transgender provision to an unrelated bill that would impact not just transgender women and girls but all women and girls,” the letter states.

They also blast provisions that would hand over control of the museum’s creation to the president and his allies.

“The design and location of a museum about women, fought for and supported by women, should not be controlled by one man and his loyalists — particularly not a man who has been found liable for sexual assault, and regularly denigrates women based on physical appearance, among other repulsive behaviors. American women deserve better. The American people deserve better.”

Democrats say that the “sudden decision to fundamentally rewrite” H.R. 1329 “undermines years of bipartisan work and changes both the bill and the future of the museum.”

“The work to establish the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum has been rooted in the joint conviction that women’s history and women’s stories are central to the identity of our nation,” the letter says. “The eleventh-hour amendment not only wipes out years of hard-fought bipartisan progress but also threatens our support for the bill.”

The Democrats called on House Republicans to restore the original, bipartisan version of H.R. 1329, noting that their support for the bill “is contingent on the retention of the museum’s spirit and the bill’s bipartisan foundation.”

“Absent those conditions,” the letter states, “We will be compelled to oppose the politicized version of H.R. 1329 on the House floor.”

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