Should Biological Reality Govern Who Participates in Women’s Sports?

The contested debate regarding the reality and recognition of the biological differences between men and women has now reached the United States Supreme Court. After a firestorm of social media controversy, on January 13, 2026, the Court heard oral arguments in two cases: West Virginia v. B. P. J. and Little v. Hecox. These cases are framed by recently passed statutes in Idaho and West Virginia that reserve girls’ sports for females.

Claiming that the laws are unconstitutional, trans-identifying men seek to invalidate state laws. The Court addressed two highly combustible questions: 1) Whether Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prevents a state from consistently designating girls' and boys' sports teams based on biological sex determined at birth; and (2) whether the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment prevents a state from offering separate boys' and girls' sports teams based on biological sex determined at birth.

Legal questions persist despite June Campbell’s conclusion that the claim that our true selves wait to be determined by our autonomous selves at some future time, unrelated to biological reality is nothing less than a myth. In her view, the transgender movement arises out of the psychopathology of adults who have conspired to create an environment of coercion and confusion for young children and young adults that is firmly disassociated from reality.

Against this background, no matter how the Court decides this case, this debate—pitting trans-identifying men against biological women—will persist. This dispute centers on whether the American republic should separate truth from falsity. This debate, regarding truth, falsity, and biological sex reality, extends well beyond athletic fields, thus implicating all areas of society, including the question of whether men can give birth.

To be explicit, even though this particular conflict concerns what June Campbell calls “the active participation of adults in the fabrication of a fantasy that humans can change sex,” conflicts over rights are inescapable in a world of limited abundance. No one should be surprised that the contested claims of trans-identifying men, if accepted, have the capacity to shrink the rights of women in many areas of society, including the realm of sports.

We live in a tumultuous age in which human imagination has been unleashed so much so that theologians have reduced God by imagining him in their own image. In contrast, other humans literally imagine themselves to be members of the animal kingdom in need of litter boxes. Against this backdrop, disputes over rights are sure to multiply.

Larry Siedentop notes that such disputes have increased ever since Christianity provided a basis for the invention of the “individual,” thus allowing radical human autonomy to flourish. Consequently, the West has refashioned identity to include skin color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and, according to the New York City Commission on Human Rights, 31 categories of gender.

Against this backdrop, gender identity has become a contested category involving claims and counterclaims. For many Americans, truth and falsity are based on emotional feelings, tied to identities that apparently trump the capacity of lawyers and some Supreme Court Justices to define “man” and “woman.”

At the same time, it is worth noting that Title IX, which was designed to protect girls’ sports, is rooted in biological reality and is intended to ensure fairness, safety, and equal access to educational programs for women and girls throughout the United States. This proliferating debate regarding gender now implicates parental rights in public schools.

Both California and Maryland force children to participate in gender identity activities that conform to the political, social, and emotional desires of teachers, political actors, and interest groups. Simultaneously, parental rights under the First Amendment are often given short shrift, despite the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which holds that parents of public elementary school students must be given the opportunity to opt their children out of “LGBTQ+-inclusive” storybooks and teachings.

Forecasting the future is always tricky. Still, it seems likely that states such as California and Maryland, as well as trans-identifying males, will face strong headwinds at the United States Supreme Court, which is charged with settling disputes in what has become an increasingly pluralistic country. But the question becomes: will the Supreme Court forcefully challenge the idea that has become increasingly entrenched among elites, academics, and journalists that the self is simply an idealized, autonomous being that lies in wait for us to shape it in a manner that is unrelated to biological reality?

It is doubtful that courts are well-equipped to settle such questions. Perhaps what is needed is a constitutional convention that includes theologians and the common folk, because the fundamental issue is what does it mean to be human in a world wherein endless possibilities, including transhumanism, euthanasia, and genocide as a form of population control, are now being openly debated and advanced by scientists, lawyers, psychologists, and physicians.