WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear two cases that may settle whether states are legally permitted to maintain the integrity of girls’ and women’s sports, medical experts have filed a brief urging the justices to allow states to protect female student athletes from being forced to compete with gender-confused males.
They cite the unfairness and dangers of “prioritiz[ing] gender ideology over biology.”
In the two cases, Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., lower courts have undermined women’s sports laws and forced schools to let boys compete in female sports.
‘Transitioning’ to a different sex is biologically impossible’
The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) – one of the nation’s leading science-oriented medical organizations – explains in its brief that “When males compete in female categories, girls predictably lose roster spots and scholarships, face unequal competition, and in some sports bear higher injury risk. Those are real medical and developmental harms to minors … sex-separated teams are evidence-based safeguards for fairness and equal opportunity.”
“Sex is not assigned, and it cannot be changed. It is a stable biological reality, and grounding athletic classifications in that reality is necessary to maintain fairness,” explains ACPeds.
They remind the justices that “Biological sex [is] an immutable and objectively verifiable trait” and that “‘Transitioning’ to a different sex is biologically impossible.”
‘Testosterone suppression does not eliminate male performance advantages’
Across all sports, “men outperform women by margins ranging from 10% in swimming and rowing to over 50% in baseball pitching,” the brief explains. “And hormone suppression does not close the gap: even after years of treatment, male athletes retain strength and endurance levels above those of female peers … athletic advantages that hormone suppression and surgeries cannot erase.”
“While dismissing the well-documented physiological differences between males and females, the [lower courts] embraced the unproven claim that identity and hormone [use] can erase sex-based advantages,” wrote the health professionals. “But that is false: the evidence shows these differences are in fact sex-based, not hormone level- based, and those differences amply justify sex segregated sports – and associated intimate spaces such as locker rooms.”
ACPeds is not the only group urging the Supreme Court to rule in favor of allowing states to protect girls’ sports competitions from gender-confused males.
Heroic former “transgender”-identifying individuals Billy Burleigh, KathyGrace Duncan, Laura Perry Smalts, and Jane Smith filed a brief in support of the ability of states “to protect young people from the harms of transitioning by not ‘affirming’ a student’s perception as a member of the opposite sex and instead maintaining separate sports teams for girls and boys.”
They contend that “research shows that an increasing number of youth and adults are detransitioning, indicating harm and lack of efficacy of the interventions” to chemically and surgically transition young people.
Riley Gaines and 32 current and former college athletes have filed a brief, explaining to the nine justices that they have been “harmed by the rules of college sports governing bodies that have authorized and continue to authorize men to take women’s places and share women’s locker rooms, showers and other private spaces in college sports.”
“The transgender eligibility rules of college athletic associations and conferences have system-wide discriminatory impacts on women,” write the former college athletes, who say they “have been harmed by the college sports governing bodies imposing transgender eligibility rules.”
