Fairness and safety for female athletes
Tomorrow, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments in two cases that, combined, put into the spotlight one of the major conflicts in the culture wars that have preoccupied much of the country in recent years. As among the first to champion the fight for women’s sports, we know the profound implications that the High Court’s decision in these cases could have on a broad spectrum of American life and, in particular, on the future of women in our society.
Legally, the court will specifically consider whether states are required to sacrifice fair and safe athletics for female athletes when male athletes identify and wish to compete as girls. Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador and West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey, joined by attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom who also represent us in our own separate lawsuit, will defend laws in these two states that protect women’s sports against lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU promotes its ideology that gender confusion trumps human biology.
The issue of athletics has become a cause celebre in recent years, with more and more Americans recognizing the threats and injustice of biological men competing against women: depriving them of medals and championships, putting them in physical danger, and denying them countless scholarship opportunities and places in the record books.
But beyond all that, the issue of sport brought out the reality of biology itself, underscoring the fact that femininity and masculinity are not mere states of mind, and that men and women are irreversibly, insurmountably different and distinct anatomically and physiologically. Men are bigger, faster and stronger, in ways that time, drugs and feelings cannot change.
Ignoring these facts not only puts women at risk of injury or injustice: it reverses 50 years of advancement on and off the sports field. The Title IX law of 1972 was specifically passed to ensure that women and girls would compete on a level playing field, receiving equal opportunities to compete. The law prevents schools from expanding sports programs aimed at male athletes at the expense of females, but this protection completely collapses when male athletes simply transfer their physical advantages into women’s sports.
There is a lot to unravel. The year Title IX took effect, fewer than 300,000 girls participated in high school sports; that number now stands at nearly 3.5 million. Between 1972 and 2024, the number of female collegiate athletes increased from fewer than 32,000 to more than 235,000.
In 1972, only 2 percent of college athletic budgets funded women’s sports; today, about 40% do. And while, before Title IX, college sports scholarships for female athletes were almost non-existent, today, 41% of these scholarships are awarded to women.
All this progress will go backwards if men can take up places on both men’s and women’s teams; this torpedoes Title IX and hijacks women’s sports. Fairness cannot be built on lies.
And that, ultimately, is the problem. The legal conflict and revised biology are born from a lie. All the nonsense that has abounded in recent years – telling us, among other things, that men can get pregnant, that children should be taught sexual ideologies, and that young people should be allowed to undergo body modification surgeries that would make them lifelong patients to achieve the sex change they or their parents want for them – is all based on the belief that reality can be ignored, denied or altered.
This pathology ends up harming everyone. This threatens the safety of girls and women in men’s and women’s toilets and changing rooms, on sports fields and on playgrounds. This endangers children who suffer permanent physical and psychological injuries from increasingly discredited treatments and surgeries. And it erodes society’s consistent understanding of common sense, gender distinctions, and the nature of truth itself.
The High Court, in considering these cases, has the opportunity to provide lasting service to all Americans, but especially to women, who in recent years have seen not only their opportunities erased, but also their dignity undermined by the proposition that sex does not matter.
It matters. This should matter. And we hope that those charged with our nation’s laws and “justice for all” will restore common sense, fairness, and safety to our society…simply by recognizing the reality that so many are determined not to see.
Smith, Mitchell, Soule and Nicoletti are plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against the Connecticut Association of Schools over its policy allowing men to compete in women’s sports.
