Girls’ sports on the line

Virtually every die-hard sports fan has found himself or herself yelling at a television set or booing in a stadium, incredulous that a call did not go their team’s way in a pivotal moment. The failures of the arbitrators in charge of the proceedings to make just rulings on a court or field can impact not just a game’s outcome, but an entire season, if not a team’s history and identity.

The U.S. Supreme Court is tasked with making a sports-related call in a pivotal moment that will impact this country’s history, for better or worse: The nation’s highest court must determine whether laws in Idaho and West Virginia that aim to keep male athletes out of girls’ and women’s sports pass muster under the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause and Title IX, the federal statute aimed at ensuring equal educational opportunities for women and girls at federally funded institutions.

I’ve personally played small roles in the passage of both states’ laws. First, as an attorney who wrote a law journal article on the subject years before the issue of so-called “transgender” athletes in women’s sports became a focal point in national elections, I advocated for the passage of Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act before the state’s legislature in 2021. I also advised a legislative assistant in West Virginia about the issue in a phone conversation later that year. In addition, I’ve appeared before legislatures in several other states to advocate for keeping sports segregated on the basis of sex.

When speaking before those legislatures, I highlighted each state’s high school track and field records—specifically, running events, the high jump, and the shot put. Without fail, boys ran faster, jumped higher, and threw farther (using heavier weights to boot) than their female counterparts. Often, the differences in times, heights, or distances were not close. This data confirms what should be obvious: Male athletes generally have biological advantages that necessitate the need for separate women’s categories.

That’s to say nothing of the fact that even after Title IX’s passage in 1972, female athletes still had to fight for equal opportunities in high school and college sports. Longtime University of Michigan softball coach Carol Hutchins—the winningest softball coach in NCAA Division I history—once recounted to ESPN how, during her days as a basketball player at Michigan State in the mid-1970s, the Spartans’ men’s basketball coach demanded that the women’s team vacate the court and make room for his team to practice: “Nobody (cares) about women’s basketball,” the coach proclaimed, albeit more profanely. And even as recently as 2021, University of Oregon women’s basketball player Sedona Prince exposed disparities between workout equipment made available at the NCAA’s women’s tournament versus those at the men’s tournament.

Still, there came a point when certain blue states began letting male athletes who call themselves female compete on teams that correspond with their so-called “gender identity” rather than sex, all in the name of “inclusion.” My native California, sadly, led that charge.

We’ve seen where that road leads: Boys who wouldn’t come close to beating other boys for state track and field championships started achieving that very thing against girls. It’s already happened in at least six states—California, Oregon, Washington, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Maine. Even when boys finished second or lower in those states, they still displaced girls from earning medals.

Then there are the injuries female athletes have suffered at the hands of males in what should have been female-only sports: We’ve seen gruesome videos of a field hockey player in Massachusetts and a volleyball player in North Carolina who suffered horrific injuries—not to mention psychological scars—when male opponents rocketed shots off their faces.

The Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause doesn’t require courts to treat things that are different in fact as though they are the same in law. It’s beyond debate that a male who claims to be female despite having clearly male physiology is quite different from a female with actual female physiology. Courts have long been mindful of the fact that such differences do exist between the sexes and, accordingly, ruled that accounting for those differences is constitutionally permissible.

As for Title IX, letting males usurp athletic opportunities set aside for girls and women would make that law essentially pointless. It might not push young women out of sports entirely, but it would preclude many from participating, rob them of individual accolades, and exchange the truth for a lie in the process (Romans 1:25).

Keeping males out of female sports is thus not just the best way to prevent that from happening, it’s the only way. I pray the Supreme Court doesn’t blow this call.