The High Court Delivers a Victory for Women’s Sports

The Supreme Court’s ruling allowing states to bar transgender females from women’s sports teams brings common sense to a question that is sparking debate nationally. By a six to three vote the Nine upheld Idaho and West Virginia laws to hold that states, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh writes, “may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females.” The athletes challenging those laws argued that they ran afoul of the promise of equal protection.The high court, though, found that “forcing female athletes to compete against males can undermine competitive fairness.” That premise has motivated 27 states — including the two here — as well as the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and college sports to all ban biological men from competing in women’s sports. The Trump administration urged the justices to greenlight that position.Justice Kavanaugh contends that “participation in sports has enabled countless American women and girls to be on a team, to take part in the human drama of athletic competition, to overcome the agony of defeat and know the thrill of victory.” The majority appears persuaded by the IOC’s position that bans of the kind at stake here “protect fairness in such sports and events, as well as safety particularly in contact sports.”The Equal Protection Clause ordains that no state shall deny “to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Courts have held that laws that make distinctions on the basis of sex — like the ones at issue here — must show that they are “substantially related” to achieving an “important” government objective.” The Supreme Court rules that providing “equal athletic opportunities for the female sex” easily clears that hurdle. The high court, in addition to finding that the bans passed constitutional muster, also determined that it did not run afoul of Title IX. That law which bans discrimination on the basis of sex by any institution that, like universities, receives federal funds. The court’s majority reckons that the “ordinary meaning of the term ‘sex’ at the time of enactment in the early 1970s was biological sex and not gender identity, particularly in the sports context.”Justice Kavanaugh, an athlete in his student days at Georgetown Preparatory School, writes of being “acutely aware of the difficulties sometimes faced by boys who identify as girls (and by girls who identify as boys) in middle school, high school, and beyond.” Evoking a world of sweat, competition, and grace, he insists that “no student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified.”

The High Court Delivers a Victory for Women’s Sports

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