The Supreme Court just handed down a huge win for biological truth and common sense.
In a 6-3 opinion Tuesday, the court upheld state bans on biological males playing in female sports, ruling against challenges in West Virginia and in Idaho.
And for many athletes turned activists, including former college swimmers Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan and retired pro soccer player Elizabeth Eddy, it feels like a sweet victory.
“I’m so thankful,” Eddy told me.
They all used the same word: “vindicated.” But, they acknowledge, there’s still more to be done. The game is still being played.
“This ruling just means that having a sports category solely for women isn’t unconstitutional. It doesn’t mean that states have to make the women’s category exclusive to real women. It just means it’s not illegal if they do so,” Gaines said.
There are currently 27 states that have banned biological males from women’s sports.
Tuesday’s decision is another bulwark against the regressive argument that men can simply chose to be female, take some hormones and be granted a key to women’s spaces and competition.
It’s also a rebuke of the far left progressives’ notion that this presents no safety issue or physical disadvantage for girls.
But let’s remember how far we’ve come since this illiberal and oppressive fog settled down on our society.
“Go back to 2020 … when institutions, corporations, universities and governing bodies, and even courts began to pretend that reality was somehow up for debate,” said Gaines, the former University of Kentucky swimmer.
She recounted how, at her 2022 confirmation hearing, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of today’s dissenters, “couldn’t answer the question of what is a woman because she’s ‘not a biologist.’”
Indeed, this has been a hard fought battle in which advocates risked everything to stand up and say what we’ve known since the dawn of time: Men and women are biologically different, and men have a physical advantage.
Sex matters.
The issue came to a head in 2021 when UPenn men’s swimmer Will Thomas reintroduced himself as Lia Thomas and joined the women’s team.
His new teammates were essentially told: You will like it or else.
And If they had a problem with a 6-foot-4 biological man, his genitalia intact, having access to their locker room? Or with him being given the ability to compete — and dominate? Seek counseling, the school urged.
That social pressure and groupthink kept teammates and competitors quiet for a while. First Scanlan spoke out anonymously. Then Gaines, publicly. Not long after, Scanlan unmasked herself.
“We were told we were bigots,” said Scanlan, who is now a Senior Fellow at the American Principles Project. She is certainly celebrating the win, but also wonders, “Why did it take so long to take for the adults in the room to acknowledge what we knew back then as teenagers?”
Even before we knew Thomas’ name, the issue had quietly been bubbling over in Connecticut, where two boys started identifying as girls and beating all the female runners. Four of those runners bravely came together to mount a bumpy and lengthy legal battle that is still unresolved.
Gaines, who now hosts “The Riley Gaines” show on Outkick, says she would be “remiss” to not go even further back and credit the women who fought to make Title IX a reality.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion underscored the need to respect both female and trans athletes. But the justice, who has coached his own two daughters in hoops, also offered insight into why women shouldn’t be expected to sacrifice their ambition on the altar of inclusion.
“Sports are highly competitive and generally zero sum,” he wrote for the majority. “Women and girls who play sports care deeply about all of those things. They obsess about them. They spend extraordinary time and effort to train in the heat and in the cold.”
The jubilation is somewhat tempered by media framing. NBC published an article after the decision, saying it delivers “another major blow to LGBTQ rights.” A CBS tweet called it the “latest setback for transgender rights.”
It’s a stark reminder that some institutions and politicians still feel the need to sing the song and do the dance that a small group of activists demand: that the idea of kindness to boys matters more than fairness to girls.
And yet, this was an 80/20 issue that forced many liberals to move center right and even vote for Trump.
But I take heart in Eddy’s perspective. After writing a compassionate op-ed last fall about the need to maintain the integrity of single sex sports, she was publicly blasted by some teammates.
However, “a lot of my peers privately offered support,” she told me. Some people simply aren’t ready to say the truth out loud. Hopefully this empowers the ones still whispering.
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