Uprooting gender ideology

What started with four high school girls in Connecticut has now reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The voices of female athletes fighting for fairness and safety will resound today in the high court as it hears its first women’s sports cases.

After losing repeatedly to male athletes, four New England girls decided to do something about it. Represented by my law firm, Alliance Defending Freedom, the girls filed a first-of-its-kind federal lawsuit challenging their state for allowing males to compete in girls’ sports, and thus, consistently depriving girls of opportunities to compete at elite levels and win state championship titles.

What those teenage girls did not know is that their brave stance would trigger a national reckoning.

Middle- and high-school girls began to tell their stories of being forced to compete against and share locker rooms with male athletes. College swimmers Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan spoke out after male swimmer Lia Thomas broke six records at the Ivy League Women’s Championship, beating two former Olympic medalists. Maine Nordic cross-country skier Cassidy Carlisle didn’t stay silent after she lost 11 times to a taller, faster, and more muscular male athlete.

Other women and girls of all ages and skill levels jumped into the fray. A female fencer chose to take a knee instead of compete against a male athlete. High-school seniors at a Christian school in California made the hard decision to forfeit the last volleyball game of their season rather than play against a male athlete, which would have contradicted their religious beliefs about gender. A middle-school girl in West Virginia said enough was enough after a male track-and-field athlete displaced 423 different girls 1,100 times and took 57 medals from them.

Those girls will never get those opportunities back. Neither will the more than 600 women and girls worldwide who lost nearly 900 medals across 29 different sports to male competitors.

In response to the injustice of watching boys trounce girls on their own turf, 27 state legislatures got busy writing laws to protect women’s sports. Two of those states are West Virginia and Idaho.

And that’s when the American Civil Liberties Union decided to pick a fight. In red states throughout America, they filed lawsuits against the commonsense legislation, choosing ideology over biology. On the other hand, we,
serving alongside West Virginia and Idaho at the Supreme Court, have the law, common sense, science, biology, American sentiment, and truth on our side.

Seeing a male athlete crush female competitors in the 100-meter dash or the Olympic boxing ring is a vivid display of the much larger issue of the scourge of gender ideology that has infiltrated every aspect of society.

It’s a lie that a man can be a woman. If we want a society that respects women, we must accept that truth. Gender ideology hurts everyone, especially children and women. Kids struggling with gender dysphoria deserve so much better than being told to reject their bodies and pushed down a one-way destructive path toward irreversible drugs and surgeries.

And women deserve their own private spaces. Men don’t belong in women’s showers, restrooms, locker rooms, overnight accommodations, prisons, or shelters. Allowing men into female-only spaces erases the privacy and safety those spaces were designed to protect. No woman should be asked to sacrifice her dignity to validate someone else’s perceived identity.

Truth and morality are the foundation upon which a thriving society is built. If we surrender the right to speak the most basic truths—like men aren’t women—or fail to fight the most basic injustices—like men shouldn’t compete in women’s sports—lasting harm to our societal order will be sure to follow.

Indeed, we must uproot gender ideology from the law. And one way we can achieve that is by allowing states to establish—and enforce—reasonable laws that uphold the biological reality that men and women are different.

For far too long, female athletes have been sidelined, silenced, and denied the chance to be champions. While cultural winds have shifted toward reality—and nearly eight in 10 Americans now support protecting women’s sports—too many courts are still getting it wrong. It’s time for the Supreme Court to settle the question.

Our nation is at a crossroads. We can protect a female-only sports category, or we can deny women equal opportunity and accept the demise of women’s sports in America. I pray our nation’s high court sides with truth.