There was little question who was going to win in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox. The two cases, which went to the Supreme Court this term, contested laws in West Virginia and Idaho barring transgender women and girls from competing in women’s school sports. Even many LGBTQ activists seemed to recognize that this effort was doomed.
Writing last year about U.S. v. Skrmetti, a test of red-state bans on pediatric medical transition, Nicholas Confessore wrote in the New York Times: “In private meetings of L.G.B.T.Q. legal-advocacy groups, many lawyers expected a loss almost from the moment the court agreed to hear the case.” The Supreme Court’s Skrmetti decision in June 2025 upheld the state bans and dashed any realistic hope of getting trans people declared a protected class, such as racial minorities, whose exclusion would trigger strict judicial scrutiny.
After Skrmetti, it looked unlikely that the Supreme Court was going to rule trans women had a right to participate in women’s sports. Lindsay Hecox tried, and failed, to moot her case by declaring she no longer had any intention of competing in Idaho sports. Lawyers for the trans athletes fell back on the position that while yes, there may be safety and fairness reasons for separate women’s divisions, it was unfair to exclude biological males whose athletic advantage had been reduced by puberty blockers or hormones.
These arguments at times bordered on incoherent — is any sufficiently unathletic male entitled to join the women’s team? And if not, why should these particular males be given that right? Advocates for the trans rights side had no good answer.
It is no surprise that the trans athletes lost Tuesday at the Supreme Court. It is more surprising that these cases were brought at all. Who thought this was a good idea?
Confessore’s article suggests the answer is activists engaged in the fatal activity known as reading your own press releases. Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal were increasingly committed to radical ideas about gender that had little public support and saw the pursuit of sweeping civil rights rulings as “the logical next step” in turning those views into law. Their previous victories on same-sex marriage, and the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock decision, which ruled that a funeral home could not fire an employee who presented as the opposite sex, gave them reason to hope for more victories.
That hope was fanned by establishment institutions, where those activists had won even more sweeping victories in record-setting time. In 2010 it would have been unremarkable for even a bona fide progressive to suggest that children should wait for adulthood to transition, or that women’s sports should be reserved for biological women. By 2020, thanks to fierce activist pressure, even right-leaning professionals were terrified to express such retrograde views, except perhaps among carefully screened friends. That gave LGBTQ groups the illusion that they were at the vanguard of an emerging consensus.
Unfortunately, they had skipped the critical step in building consensus: persuasion. Progressive-leaning institutions, such as media and academia, were instead pressed into embracing fairly extreme views — the gender binary was fake and who belonged to the category “woman” was a mystical question of inner feeling, not mere biology. These tactics backfired disastrously; broader public opinion never came over to their side and has now moved in the opposite direction. As the poet Samuel Butler pointed out in the 17th century, “He that complies against his will / is of his own opinion still.” Butler might justly have added, “Only now they’re really mad about it.”
There’s a lesson in that, and not just for the progressive groups that have scored historic defeats for their cause and set themselves up for further losses. Some observers expect that the Supreme Court will soon be asked to decide not just whether states are allowed to exclude trans women and girls from women’s sports, as the court ruled this week, but whether Title IX — the federal law banning sex discrimination in education — requires them to do so.
Lots of people quail at the long, hard work required to deliver real social or political changes — you know, like the decades of patient little wins that LGBTQ groups accumulated before the Supreme Court delivered the ultimate victory in the 2015 decision that declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. It’s very tempting to look for a quick fix. That’s certainly the approach favored by the Trump administration.
The trans backlash helped propel Donald Trump back into office, and yet once there, the administration looked for institutional shortcuts rather than trying to build public and legislative consensus for durable change. Much faster to act through hasty executive action — the dubious DOGE, the whimsical tariffs, the impromptu invasions, the inhumane immigration raids.
Many of these efforts have also come to grief in the courts, but the real loss is in the court of public opinion, where Trump’s approval rating sank below 40 percent. Every overreach makes it more likely that Democrats will retake the White House in 2028 and ensure most of this frantic effort is for naught.
Should that happen, Democrats will also be tempted to read a mandate into the public backlash, mistaking a temporary turn of affairs for a decisive win. They would be wiser to eschew the whole idea of a quick victory. Those sorts of “wins” are to actual political change what instant coffee is to a good cup of joe. It may look like coffee, and it’s certainly faster than the real thing. But if you try it, you’ll find it tastes like defeat.
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