WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – Twenty-four philosophy professors filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold two state laws limiting school athletic programs to actual members of the dedicated sex.
The brief concerns legal challenges to laws protecting girls’ sports in Idaho and West Virginia, both of which have been blocked from enforcement by lower courts. The nation’s highest court agreed in July to take the cases, brought by a gender-confused male seeking to compete on the Boise State University women’s cross country and track teams; and a gender-confused male middle schooler who competes in track and field events against girls in West Virginia.
Signed by faculty representing Oxford, Notre Dame, the Universities of Florida and Virginia, and more, the brief is meant to counter the theoretical rationalization of men in women’s sports that dominate left-wing academia by laying out the case for what sex actually is and why it is legitimate to recognize sex distinctions in matters such as academia.
“(O)rganizing sports around the sex categories is fully justified, given the officially uncontested fact that it is justified to organize sports approximately around the sex categories,” they argue. “Its argument leverages a general philosophical distinction between more and less natural categories. This distinction will be applied to reinforce the case for organizing sports around the sex categories, as well as against reorganizing sports around alternative categories to which vividly ad hoc exceptions have been built in. Finally, the argument will be extended to the disputed question of the intended function of the Idaho and West Virginia statutes, which it is concluded is, indeed, the face-value one: to enable female participation in sports by means of excluding male would-be competitors.”
“Here was an opportunity to redeem the discipline of philosophy in the eyes of that part of the public who don’t choose kind lies (and the logical contortions necessary to prop them up),” University of Melbourne professor Holly Lawford-Smith explained to the College Fix. “(P)hilosophy is helpful wherever there is messy and imprecise use of language, wherever there is unclarity about the reasons for or against a particular position, and wherever there are values lurking in the background not yet named or fully interrogated.”
Mandatory inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is promoted as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men (do) not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy;” therefore, “the advantage to transwomen (biological men) afforded by the (International Olympic Committee) guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
Even the left-wing United Nations has acknowledged as much, via an October 2024 report by Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem, which found that more than 600 female athletes around the world have lost more than 890 medals to men in 29 sports as of March 2024. “To avoid the loss of a fair opportunity, males must not compete in the female categories of sport,” the report concluded.
In America since the 1980s, more than 1,941 gold medals in female events that would have gone to female athletes have instead been claimed by men identifying as “trans women,” and along with them more than $493,173 in prize money across more than 10,067 amateur and professional events, according to data compiled by He Cheated and reviewed by Concerned Women for America.
The Supreme Court has not yet scheduled oral arguments in the case.
