This week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two landmark cases testing whether state laws can bar biological males from competing in girls’ and women’s school and college sports. The consolidated challenges come from Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act and West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act, and involve plaintiffs such as Lindsay Hecox and a West Virginia student known in filings as B.P.J., whose situation has drawn national attention. The stakes are enormous: the Court may decide by summer who gets protected access to athletic opportunities reserved for females.
Justice Samuel Alito cut to the heart of the matter with a blunt question that crystallized the courtroom’s dilemma: what does it mean, for equal protection purposes, to be a boy or a girl, a man or a woman? Counsel for the transgender-aligned plaintiffs struggled to offer a clean, workable definition, a failure that conservative observers said exposed the weaknesses in the case for blanket inclusion in sex-separated sports. That exchange wasn’t theater — it was a legal admission that vague identity slogans can’t substitute for clear rules when laws and fairness are at stake.
The conservative argument is straightforward and unbowed: sports are divided by sex because biology produces predictable, material differences in strength, speed, and endurance that affect competitive fairness. Title IX and equal protection questions are not abstractions when a biological male’s participation can displace scholarships, podiums, and the sense of safety and fairness for female athletes who trained under sex-based categories. Protecting women’s sports is not cruelty; it’s fidelity to the promise of equal opportunity that was hard-won for girls and women.
Progressive legal strategy has too often relied on the moral authority of identity rather than on neutral, administrable rules, and the Supreme Court’s questioning exposed that weakness. When litigants refuse to define the terms that laws rely upon, they invite courts to restore clarity and common sense rather than cede these spaces to ideological vagueness. Americans who care about fairness expect their courts to ask the tough, plain-language questions that politicians and administrators have been too timid to ask.
The policy consequences of a conservative ruling could be extensive: dozens of states have already passed statutes protecting single-sex sports teams, and millions of parents and coaches want predictable rules that preserve competition integrity. If the Court upholds state authority to define eligibility based on biological sex in athletics, it would vindicate those state efforts to protect women’s sports rather than erase them under a national standard of identity-based inclusion. Conversely, a ruling against such protections would force legislatures and school boards into a wrenching scramble to preserve the space that has allowed female athletes to flourish.
This is about more than one season or one athlete; it’s about honoring the principle that separate categories exist where biology matters. Conservatives should make no apology for insisting that laws reflect reality and protect vulnerable groups — including female athletes — from being steamrolled by ideological fads. The Supreme Court now has the chance to reaffirm that sex-based classifications in sport can be lawful and necessary when tied to the realities of physical competition.
Hardworking Americans know the country doesn’t advance by erasing distinctions that matter; it advances by acknowledging truth and building fair institutions around it. Lawmakers, coaches, and parents should seize this moment to defend girls’ opportunities and demand rules that are clear, enforceable, and respectful of biological reality. The Court’s decision will tell us whether common sense still has a seat at the table or whether every achievement by a female athlete can be second-guessed by shifting definitions.
