On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in a consolidated pair of cases -- Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. -- that present what should (should!) be one of the easiest constitutional and statutory legal questions of our time. But because we are through the looking-glass and live in an era when objective reality is routinely denied, the justices are now asked to entertain a claim that laws protecting biological women from athletic competition against biological men somehow violate either the 14th Amendment or Title IX.
That argument is simply absurd -- indeed, farcical.
Let us start with first principles. Athletics, particularly competitive athletics, are segregated by sex for one reason and one reason only: biology. Males, as a class, enjoy overwhelming and immutable physiological advantages over females in speed, strength, bone density, and muscle mass. This is not controversial. It is not hateful. It is not ideological. It is simply the truth.
The Idaho and West Virginia laws at issue reflect this basic reality by ensuring that women's sports remain for women -- meaning actual women, biological females. The plaintiffs nonetheless insist that allowing biological males who "identify" as female to compete in women's sports is somehow required by either the 14th Amendment (ratified in 1868) or Title IX (passed in 1972). Under this theory, it is legal discrimination to acknowledge the very biological differences that made the second-wave feminist push for women's sports necessary in the first place.
Somewhere, Billie Jean King is surely shaking her head.
The 14th Amendment argument is especially laughable. Ratified just three years after the end of the Civil War, the amendment's drafters were concerned with overturning the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) abomination and constitutionalizing the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which had attempted to extend broader civil and political rights to freedmen. The notion that the 14th Amendment secretly enshrined a right for males to compete in female athletic leagues -- based on an internal sense of "gender identity" -- would have been incomprehensible to anyone alive at the time. "Transgenderism," better understood as gender dysphoria, was not even conceived of, let alone woven into our constitutional fabric.
The Title IX argument fares no better. Enacted in 1972 to ensure equal educational opportunities for women, Title IX actually expressly contemplates sex-based distinctions. Indeed, women's sports as we know it today exist because of Title IX. To now claim that Title IX requires the dismantling of women's athletics in the name of faddish gender ideology is palpable insanity.
For millennia, leading statesmen and jurists have understood that law and jurisprudence cannot survive if they are severed from objective truth, biological reality, and rudimentary human anthropology. Courts are not empowered to redefine what it means to be male or female -- nor are they authorized to compel society to pretend that sex is a subjective "identity" rather than a physiological fact. When the law denies reality, it becomes not "compassionate" but grotesque -- indeed, tyrannical.
The consequences here are not abstract. Real girls and women lose podium spots, scholarships, records, and opportunities when forced to compete against biological males. The very population second-wave feminists fought for and Title IX was designed to protect is now being sacrificed on the altar of elite ideological fashion.
The Supreme Court should cut through the nonsense. The Constitution does not mandate fantasy, and federal statutes do not require self-deception. Upholding the underlying Idaho and West Virginia state laws prohibiting biological males from competing against biological females would be a reaffirmation that law still reflects truth, words still have meaning, and women's sports still belong to women.
In Springfield, Illinois, in 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln delivered a powerful speech decrying the "ravages of mob law" throughout the land. Lincoln warned, in eerily prescient fashion, that the spread of a then-ascendant "mobocratic spirit" threatened to sever the "attachment of the People" to their fellow countrymen and their nation. Lincoln's opposition to anarchy of any kind was absolute and clarion: "There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law."
Unfortunately, it seems that every few years, Americans must be reminded anew of Lincoln's wisdom. This week's lethal Immigration and Customs Enforcement standoff in the Twin Cities is but the latest instance of a years-long baleful trend.
On Wednesday, 37-year-old "queer activist" Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Good, who had barricaded her vehicle in an attempt to obstruct an active law enforcement operation, ignored agents' requests to exit the vehicle and instead directed her car at one of the agents. Good actually then hit the agent, who was briefly hospitalized for his injuries. But before she could do even more damage, the agent shot and killed Good. The federal government has called Good's encounter "an act of domestic terrorism" and said the agent shot in self-defense.
Suffice it to say Minnesota's Democratic establishment does not see it this way.