At the Supreme Court, the unfounded fear of boys masquerading as girls in youth sports rolled the clock back on gender equality. <\/p>\n
On the surface, the Supreme Court\u2019s June 30 opinion upholding state laws barring transgender girls from women\u2019s and girl\u2019s sports teams looks like a victory for women\u2019s rights. <\/p>\n
The 6-3 opinion by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh<\/a> certainly presents itself that way. \u201cFemales and males have inherent physical differences relevant to athletic performance,\u201d Kavanaugh wrote. \u201cTherefore, in contact sports, forcing female athletes to compete against males can create significant safety risks.\u201d He also asserted that \u201cforcing female athletes to compete against males can undermine competitive fairness.\u201d<\/p>\n The ruling applied to prohibitions enacted in Idaho and West Virginia against \u201cbiological\u201d males\u2019 participation on women\u2019s teams in public schools. Federal judges in both states overturned the bans. The Supreme Court majority restored them. The ruling essentially upholds similar bans enacted in 25 other states.<\/p>\n There was no record of any transgender person participating in school sports in the State, let alone any \u2018problem\u2019 with transgender students … creating unfair competition or unsafe conditions.<\/p>\n \u2014 Justice Sonia Sotomayor, demolishing the Supreme Court\u2019s argument in favor of banning transgender girls from girl\u2019s sports<\/p>\n Kavanaugh, like Donald Trump and others in the anti-transgender camp, maintained that one\u2019s gender is an immutable fact of life, established even before birth. <\/p>\n Anything else, Trump stated in an executive order<\/a> he issued on inauguration day 2025, could only be the product of \u201cgender ideology extremism.\u201d The U.S., his order stated, recognizes \u201ctwo sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.\u201d That\u2019s a \u201cbiological truth,\u201d he declared.<\/p>\n Get the latest from Michael Hiltzik <\/p>\n Commentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize winner.<\/p>\n By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service<\/a>, which include arbitration and a class action waiver. You agree that we and our third-party vendors may collect and use your information, including through cookies, pixels and similar technologies, for the purposes set forth in our Privacy Policy<\/a> such as personalizing your experience and ads. <\/p>\n In his own version of this overconfident and factually insupportable conclusion, Kavanaugh wrote: \u201cAs all agree, females and males have inherent physical differences relevant to athletic performance.\u201d<\/p>\n Science recognizes that some people are \u201cborn with sex traits that don\u2019t fit into typical male or female patterns,\u201d to cite a discussion on the Cleveland Clinic web page<\/a> on the topic \u201cintersex.\u201d The condition \u201cmay involve chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs or genitals.\u201d<\/p>\n From a psychological standpoint, medical science recognizes \u201cgender dysphoria\u201d as a real condition often requiring counseling and medical intervention such as the use of puberty blockers and hormones to stave off the development of secondary sex characteristics until the condition can be resolved.<\/p>\n No one disputes that there are physical differences between the sexes. Few would dispute that on average or even at the median, males may be bigger and more powerful than females, or that in certain contact sports the difference may be telling and on occasion dangerous.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s not the same as asserting that the physical differences between males and females invariably mean that men will invariably prevail over women in all competitions or that their participation will endanger women. <\/p>\n The International Olympic Committee \u2014 in a policy statement<\/a> Kavanaugh cited incompletely \u2014 says that in \u201cmost running and swimming events,\u201d males have a 10% to 12% advantage over women. That\u2019s a range that would accommodate the full spectrum of outcomes \u2014 transgender females win, cisfemales win, they tie. (The \u201ccis\u201d prefix denotes those living consistent with their birth gender.)<\/p>\n West Virginia and Idaho addressed this ambiguity by banning transgender women from all girls\u2019 teams. So under their rules transgender girls can\u2019t play football or soccer with cisgirls. But what\u2019s the argument in favor of banning them from the 100-yard dash, or cross-country track, or diving, or archery?<\/p>\n But something else is going on here. The Supreme Court\u2019s ruling was almost preordained, given the years-long campaign by conservatives to demonize transgender individuals as if they\u2019re members of an alien species. <\/p>\n It will be recalled that during his presidential campaign, Trump spun a despicable fantasy<\/a> in which children were kidnapped in school and secretly subjected to sex-change operations. <\/p>\n Trump\u2019s executive order wiped out policies aimed at protecting transgender adults from discrimination.<\/a> He moved to outlaw gender-affirming medical therapies<\/a> for anyone under 19 by cutting off federal funding for healthcare institutions that provide such care. <\/p>\n He banned transgender individuals from serving in the military<\/a> and ordered federal prison officials to move transgender inmates into the general populations consistent with their birth genders, which exposes them to physical assault. (Federal Judge Royce Lamberth of Washington, D.C., has blocked the government<\/a> from transferring three transgender women into the male prison population or terminating their hormone treatments.)<\/p>\n I wrote during Trump\u2019s first term<\/a>, when his anti-transgender policies were still gestating, that the goal was to show that \u201cone can target any community, as long as it doesn\u2019t have a strong political voice or political power. These are the actions of bullies and cowards, pretending to be strong.\u201d<\/p>\n Last year, the Supreme Court struck its first blow against transgender rights by upholding a Tennessee law banning transgender care, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, for minors. Similar laws have been enacted in 25 other states. The majority in that ruling by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was identical to the one in the June 30 ruling \u2014 Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.<\/p>\n Who are the targets of this ideological campaign? They number only about 1.6 million U.S. adults, or one-half of 1% of the U.S. population. About 300,000 adolescents ages 13 to 17, or 1.4%, identify as transgender, according to a study by UCLA School of Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n In West Virginia, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed in her dissenting opinion, \u201cthere was no record of any transgender person participating in school sports in the State, let along any \u2018problem\u2019 with transgender students … creating unfair competition or unsafe conditions.\u201d <\/p>\n In endorsing the flat bans directed at transgender women in Idaho and West Virginia, Kavanaugh argued that any attempt to implement case-by-case judgments of students\u2019 requests to join sports teams inconsistent with their biological gender would create \u201can enormous practical and administrability problem.\u201d<\/p>\n Is that so? That wasn\u2019t the case in Maine, where the annual K-12 population is more than 170,000. There, a committee was charged with determining whether a student\u2019s participation in a sport consistent with their gender identity but inconsistent with their biological sex would \u201cresult in an unfair athletic advantage\u201d or present a risk of injury to others. The committee held 56 hearings from 2013 through 2021, or an average of seven per year. During the entire time span, only four involved transgender girls. (The outcome of those hearings couldn\u2019t be learned.)<\/p>\n It was Maine\u2019s policy, one might recall, that provoked a confrontation between Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills at the White House last year, when Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from the state unless it barred transgender students from competing on women\u2019s sports teams. \u201cWe\u2019ll see you in court,\u201d Mills snapped. <\/p>\n Whether the Idaho and West Virginia laws genuinely protect girls from unfair competition is questionable. (The Idaho law is styled the \u201cFairness in Women\u2019s Sports Act.\u201d) In practice, the laws may subject women in public schools to \u201cinvasive sex verification procedures,\u201d as educational expert George Theoharis of Syracuse University wrote after the court ruling<\/a>. <\/p>\n They\u2019re also based on a retrograde view of women as fragile creatures needing men\u2019s protection, Theoharis wrote \u2014 \u201cthe same logic that has historically been used to justify excluding women from making their own healthcare decisions and girls from rigorous math and science; that physically demanding work is simply beyond them.\u201d (There don\u2019t appear to be any state laws barring transgender women from competing in men\u2019s sports.)<\/p>\n Becky Pepper-Jackson, the plaintiff in the West Virginia case, in which she is identified only as B.P.J., is the only transgender girl who sought to join girl\u2019s teams \u2014 track and cross-country \u2014 in the state. That was in 2021, just after West Virginia passed its law and she was about to enter sixth grade. She didn\u2019t appear to pose any competitive risk to others on the track and cross-country teams she applied to join \u2014 her lawyers told the Supreme Court that on those no-cut teams, she \u201ccame in near the back.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n Anyway, she had not gone through male puberty, which theoretically might have endowed her with a competitive advantage, because she had been taking puberty blockers and female hormones. <\/p>\n Thanks to the court\u2019s ruling, Sotomayor observed in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, West Virginia can deny Becky access to school sports \u201cbecause it thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not.\u201d<\/p>\n B.P.J., Sotomayor wrote, \u201ccannot practice on girls\u2019 teams, even if she would not take anyone\u2019s spot in an eventual competition, even if everyone who tries out for the team makes it, and even if having the chance to participate could aid immensely in treating B. P. J.\u2019s gender dysphoria.\u201d <\/p>\n So whose interest was really protected by the Supreme Court?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the Supreme Court, the unfounded fear of boys masquerading as girls in youth sports rolled the clock…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389162,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[536,19060,9514,540,156864,156862,48,52,51,47,50,49,13549,13049,20897,139063,1848,2214,156863,17599,1557],"class_list":["post-389161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-donald-trump","tag-female","tag-girl","tag-idaho","tag-inherent-physical-difference","tag-kavanaugh","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-male","tag-other-state","tag-ruling","tag-sport-team","tag-state-law","tag-supreme-court","tag-transgender-student","tag-west-virginia","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}