Tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in two cases which, combined, bring to a head one of the major conflicts of the culture wars that have preoccupied much of the country in recent years. As some of the first to champion the fight for women’s sports, we know firsthand the profound implications the high court’s decision in these cases could have for a broad spectrum of American life, and, in particular, for the future of women in our society.
Legally, the court will deal specifically with whether states are required to sacrifice fair and safe athletics for female athletes when male athletes identify and desire to compete as girls. Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador and West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey, joined by counsel from Alliance Defending Freedom who also represent us in our own separate lawsuit, will be defending the laws of those two states that safeguard women’s sports against lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU is pressing its ideology, which holds that gender confusion trumps human biology.
The athletics issue has become a cause célèbre in recent years, with more and more Americans recognizing the threats and injustice posed by biological men competing against women: robbing them of medals and championships, endangering them physically, and denying them countless opportunities for scholarships and a place in the record books.
But beyond all that, the sports issue has brought out the reality of biology itself, underscoring the fact that femininity and masculinity are not just states of mind, and that men and women are irreversibly, insurmountably different and distinct in anatomy and physiology. Men are bigger, faster, and stronger, in ways that time and drugs nor feelings can change.
Ignoring those facts not only puts women at risk of injury or injustice: it reverses 50 years of advancement on and off of the athletic court. The Title IX law of 1972 was specifically passed to ensure that women and girls would compete on a level playing field, enjoying equal opportunities to compete. The law blocks schools from expanding sports programs for male athletes at the expense of women, but that protection completely unravels when male athletes simply transfer their physical advantages into women’s sports.
There’s a lot to unravel. The year Title IX became law, less than 300,000 girls participated in high school athletics; that number now totals nearly 3.5 million. Between 1972 and 2024, the number of female collegiate athletes has grown from less than 32,000 to more than 235,000.
In 1972, only 2% of colleges’ athletic budgets funded women’s sports; today, about 40% do. And while, pre-Title IX, collegiate athletic scholarships for female athletes were nearly non-existent, today 41% of those scholarships go to women.
All that progress rolls backward if males can take spots on both men’s and women’s teams; this torpedoes Title IX and hijacks women’s sports. Fairness can’t be built on falsehoods.
And that, at root, is the problem. Both the legal conflict and the revised biology grow out of a lie. All the absurdities that have abounded in recent years — telling us, among other things, that men can become pregnant, that children should be taught sexual ideologies, and that youngsters should be allowed to get body-altering surgeries that make them lifelong patients to secure the change-of-gender they or their parents want for them — all of these are grounded in the conviction that reality can be ignored, denied, or changed.
That pathology eventually hurts everyone. It threatens the safety of girls and women in sex-specific restrooms and locker rooms, on athletic courts, and on playing fields. It endangers children who suffer permanent physical and psychological injury from increasingly discredited treatments and surgeries. And it erodes society’s abiding understanding of common sense, gender distinctions, and the nature of truth itself.
The high court, in considering these cases, has an opportunity to do enduring service to all Americans, but most of all to women, who in recent years have seen not only their opportunities erased, but their dignity undermined by the proposition that gender doesn’t matter.
It does matter. It should matter. And it’s our hope that those entrusted with the laws of our nation and “justice for all” will restore common sense, fairness, and safety to our society…simply by recognizing the reality so many are determined not to see.
Smith, Mitchell, Soule, and Nicoletti are plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against the Connecticut Association of Schools for its policies allowing males to compete in women’s sports.
