WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Next week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a pair of cases that will decide if so-called “gender identity” trumps women’s and girl’s rights.
In Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., gender-confused male athletes who want to compete in female sports competitions are challenging laws that have been enacted in recent years to maintain the integrity of girls’ and women’s sports.
In both cases, lower courts have undermined women’s sports laws and forced schools to let boys compete in female sports.
“West Virginia is ready for this argument, and we expect it to be a 9-0 decision,” predicted state Attorney General JB McCuskey. “Our argument here is that, very simply, biological males are bigger, faster, and stronger than girls, and therefore, it creates an unfair and an unsafe playing space for girls.”
Also at stake are important privacy and religious liberty issues.
Challengers, led by the left-wing ACLU, argue that state laws protecting female athletes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution as well as Title IX, a federal law that ensures female students have the same educational and extracurricular opportunities as male students.
Female athletes should no longer be ‘sidelined, silenced, and denied’
“For far too long, female athletes have been sidelined, silenced, and denied the chance to be champions. While cultural winds have shifted toward reality—and nearly 8 in 10 Americans now support protecting women’s sports—too many courts are still ruling for gender activists. It’s time for the Supreme Court to settle the question,” wrote Kristen Waggoner, CEO, president, and general counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), when the court first announced its intention to hear the two cases.
“Fifty-three years after the passage of Title IX, our nation is at a crossroads,” continued Waggoner. “We can protect the female category, or we can accept the demise of women’s sports in America.”
Among the 50 groups that have filed amicus briefs on behalf of protecting female sports are the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), medical experts, current and past female athletes, as well as former “transgender”-identifying individuals.
USCCB: Gender ideology violates core Catholic teaching
In addition to asking the SCOTUS to protect female athletes from gender-confused males, the USCCB brief says that there are serious religious liberty issues at play; A ruling in favor of “transgender” athletes would force Catholic schools to allow gender-confused males to play on female sports teams. This would necessarily require the schools to “communicate a message at odds with Catholic doctrine.”
“Gender ideology contradicts these teachings,” the USCCB filing states. “In gender ideology, human sexual identity is socially constructed and ‘dependent upon the subjective mindset of each person, who can choose a gender not corresponding to his or her biological sex, and therefore with the way others see that person (transgenderism),’” the bishops’ conference said, citing the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education.
Medical experts: ‘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.”
Former ‘transgender’ individuals urge court to protect children from harms of ‘transitioning’
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” caused by the efforts to chemically and surgically “transition” young people.
Female athletes cite unfair competition and violation of locker room privacy
Riley Gaines and 32 current and former college athletes 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.”
The court is set to hear oral arguments in the paired cases on Tuesday, January 13. The justices’ decision likely will not be made public until late spring or early summer.
