The Bigger Victory Hidden Inside SCOTUS Decision About Men in Women’s Sports

Ed wrote earlier today about the SCOTUS decision in West Virginia et al—the case where the Supreme Court upheld laws that exclude transgender “women,” i.e., men, from women’s sports. 

I don’t usually write about legal issues because I am simply not competent to do so. Ed is much better at that sort of thing, so rather than wallow in my ignorance, I pass up those stories unless there is an angle on it that goes beyond the norm in legal decisions. 

But as I read Ed’s piece, I was struck by the constant reference to sex differences, and how important they are in certain realms of life, including sports, of course. 

In assessing the reasonableness of the regulations, we also must recognize the distinctiveness of competitive sports—and the safety and competitive fairness issues that can arise when females are forced to compete against males.

With respect to safety, allowing biological males to play on women’s and girls’ sports teams can put women and girls at significant risk of injuries. The safety risks are particularly severe in contact sports. 

And as to competitive fairness, allowing biological males to play on women’s and girls’ sports teams can put female athletes at a serious disadvantage. That is because sports are generally zero sum. Allowing a biological male athlete to compete on a girls’ team necessarily displaces or disadvantages a female athlete—replacing her on the roster, knocking her out of the starting lineup, reducing her playing time, depriving her of a medal, and the like. That hard reality of sports cannot be ignored or swept under the rug. On the contrary, that reality must and does inform interpretation of the term “reasonable” in the Javits Amendment.

Whether biological males may participate on women’s and girls’ sports teams may be a debated policy question. But the legal question for Title IX purposes is whether West Virginia may limit women’s and girls’ sports teams to biological females. As a matter of text and history, West Virginia may do so.

The Court’s decision will, or at least should, have implications far beyond the composition of sports teams. As you can see, the Court absolutely destroys the fundamental argument behind alphabet ideology’s claim that sex is “assigned at birth,” can be changed, is merely a state of mind, or any of the nonsense arguments that the transgender activists make. 

Sex is biological. In just four paragraphs, the court repeats the term “biological.” 

There is no ambiguity. No wiggle room. No place to hide. When somebody who claims to be female walks around naked in a locker room, they are displaying their male penis, not a female one. 

KBJ dissents on that point, of course.

Ketanji “Not a Biologist” Brown Jackson’s dissent on SCOTUS’s trans athlete decision is, as usual, EMBARRASSING:

“There is reason to doubt the soundness of the concession that Title IX’s reference to ‘sex’ means *only* sex assigned at birth.”

“A transgender woman penalized for… pic.twitter.com/9fIMky3E8j

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) June 30, 2026

Ketanji “Not a Biologist” Brown Jackson’s dissent on SCOTUS’s trans athlete decision is, as usual, EMBARRASSING:

“There is reason to doubt the soundness of the concession that Title IX’s reference to ‘sex’ means *only* sex assigned at birth.”

“A transgender woman penalized for being perceived as aggressive has experienced discrimination ‘on the basis of sex’ just as much as a cisgender woman has, no matter that the transgender woman’s behavior matches expectations of her sex assigned at birth. Either way, the institution has imposed its gender-based expectations upon her. And either way, the institution may have violated Title IX.”

It will take some time for the implications of this decision to filter through into civil and criminal cases, but this decision should lay the groundwork for a series of challenges to laws and practices that are based on the claim that sex is determined by nothing more than a personal declaration. 

If men are men and women are women on the basis of biological distinctions, then forcing girls to undress in front of boys in private spaces is clearly unlawful. 

While I doubt that private businesses could legally be forced to provide female-only spaces, I suspect that women may start winning civil cases based on the claim that these businesses implicitly promise single-sex spaces when they label locker rooms or bathrooms as “male” or “female.” Providing co-ed spaces may be legal and permissible, but promising sex-specific spaces while allowing men into women’s spaces could arguably be fraud. 

Obviously, cases like this will have to be tried, and it’s likely that some courts will be more or less sympathetic to these arguments based on the political leanings of the judges and juries. 

At the very least, parents will have an extremely strong Title IX case against school districts that force young girls to compete with and share locker rooms with boys. 

As Ed notes, the decision itself does not require states to ban boys from women’s sports, but the reasoning underpinning it definitely sets up legal challenges to including boys in girls’ sports and in their locker rooms. 

All you should have to do is point to this decision, which clearly distinguishes between biological boys and biological girls, and the reasoning that their rights must be interpreted in that light. 

Once you acknowledge that men and women are fundamentally different based on immutable biology, a whole host of issues are implicitly decided, and decided against the Alphabet crowd. 

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