The Supreme Court has the chance this week to save women’s sports, allowing states to restore a level playing field for girls by excluding biological men and thereby correcting one of the worst excesses of America’s cultural revolution.
On Tuesday, the justices will hear oral arguments in challenges to laws enacted by West Virginia and Idaho. The court is weighing whether blocking biological males who identify as women from participating in female sports violates their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The answer is obviously no, and the very existence of these cases represents a failure of policy and politics.
It’s a policy failure because activist groups pushed for policies that were far outside the mainstream. About 7 in 10 U.S. adults believe athletic participation should be determined by biological sex, not gender identity. It’s a political failure because those groups never really tried to make a compelling case for their agenda. Instead, they attacked those who disagreed as transphobic and sought to shut down debate.
Is there evidence that males are better athletes than females? Yes, scads.
Do those advantages persist after hormone treatments? Scientists have looked into the matter, and yes. A recent paper in the Journal of Applied Physiology shows that testosterone suppression among biological boys modestly reduces athletic performance, but a large male-female performance gap remains.
None of this will surprise anyone who watched Lia Thomas rocket from a middling Division I men’s freestyler at the University of Pennsylvania to an NCAA women’s championship. But those are the facts, for anyone tempted to disbelieve their lying eyes. Separate sports divisions exist to mitigate those biological gaps. It’s impossible to construct a coherent case for unfettered trans inclusion that fits those facts, without ultimately arguing for abolishing women’s athletics entirely.
The growth of such programs was among the greatest triumphs of the feminist movement, but biological boys roll back that progress when they take away roster spots, trophies and scholarships from biological girls who would otherwise earn them. Rather than unlawful discrimination on the basis of sex, the laws being challenged are reasonable concessions to immutable reality.
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