The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday to uphold state laws banning biological males from competing on female sports teams, delivering a tremendous victory for female athletes and the commonsense principle that biological sex matters in athletic competition.
Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion in West Virginia v. B.P.J., which the court combined with Little v. Hecox. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch each wrote a concurring opinion. The 6-3 decision found West Virginia's Save Women's Sports Act and Idaho's Fairness in Women's Sports Act both constitutional, rejecting claims that the bans violate Title IX or the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A huge victory for women. Real women.
The majority concluded that “Title IX allows schools to provide separate women’s and men’s sports teams defined by biological sex, and West Virginia has permissibly maintained female sports for biological females consistent with Title IX.”
The term “sex” in Title IX, the Javits Amendment, and the Title IX regulations cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex. The ordinary meaning of the term “sex” at the time of enactment in the early 1970s was biological sex and not gender identity, particularly in the sports context.
That conclusion required no legal gymnastics, just common sense. In the end, biology is biology. Title IX was supposed to bring fairness into sports, and the transgender movement has been
That the Supreme Court had to even weigh in on this is quite sad, just as it was sad that states had even to pass laws that made it clear that girls’ sports are for girls, not boys who pretend to be girls.
So, how did we get here? Well, Idaho passed the Fairness in Women's Sports Act in 2020, the first law of its kind in the country. West Virginia followed in 2021. Both laws faced immediate legal challenges from the radical left, yada, yada, yada, and it went before the Supreme Court.
Honestly, the challengers were doomed to fail. They built their case primarily on Bostock v. Clayton County, the 2020 ruling that extended Title VII's sex discrimination protections to gay and transgender employees. Their argument was that if you can't discriminate against a transgender person at work, you can't exclude one from a sports team. If that explanation sounds stupid to you, you’re not alone. Biological sex is largely irrelevant to workplace performance, but it is directly relevant to athletic competition, and no amount of self-identification or plastic surgery can change your biology.
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President Donald Trump signed an executive order in February 2025 directing the federal government to pull funding from schools that allow biological males on female sports teams, calling such policies "demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls." His solicitor general, D. John Sauer, filed a brief calling both state laws "eminently reasonable." Today's ruling directly validates that position.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, which was hardly surprising at all. Jackson, for one, was unable to define what a woman is during her confirmation hearings in 2022 because, in her own words, “I’m not a biologist.” Sotomayor wrote the dissenting opinion, joined by Kagan and Jackson.
The female athletes who intervened in both cases to defend these laws spent years fighting for the right to compete on a level playing field. The far left spent those same years calling them bigots for trying. Now that the highest court in the land has ruled on this issue, women can once again enjoy the fair opportunities they deserve under Title IX and not have to worry about biological males robbing them of awards and opportunities.
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