Photo by Alex WROBLEWSKI / AFP via Getty Images
Tuesday’s ruling is a victory for fairness, reality, and the girls whom Title IX was meant to protect.
After the Supreme Court heard arguments in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and the companion case, Little v. Hecox, earlier this year, it looked like the challenges to West Virginia’s and Idaho’s laws prohibiting biological males from playing girls’ and women’s sports would fail. Tuesday’s ruling confirms why: Sex categories in sports exist for a reason, and neither the Constitution nor federal law requires schools to pretend otherwise.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion gets the central point right. The question wasn’t whether transgender students deserve dignity, but whether the 1972 Education Amendments’ Title IX and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause forbid schools from maintaining girls’ and women’s sports for biological females. Kavanaugh’s opinion is admirably direct: “The answer is yes.” That is, schools may preserve female athletic categories based on biological sex.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Free Press
______________________
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute.