It’s been more than a decade since I first had to take the stand to defend female athletes when the Minnesota State High School League (MSHSL) laid the groundwork for erasing girls’ sports. The League wholeheartedly embraced policies allowing unfair competition between male and female athletes. It changed its bylaws to allow males to play on girls’ sports teams despite significant opposition and incontrovertible statistics showing that males have a significant competitive advantage and may risk injuring female competitors.

While gender ideologues seem to have captured “progressive” Minnesota, even more “conservative” states like Idaho and West Virginia are not immune to the epidemic of through-the-looking-glass notions of womanhood. Challenges to those states’ laws protecting female athletics are now being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court.

This week, I had the privilege of sitting just feet away from the Supreme Court bench during oral arguments in two landmark cases, Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., that will significantly impact the fate of women’s and girls’ sports in America. The highest court must now decide whether laws enacted to protect women’s and girls’ opportunities based on biological sex rather than a person’s sense of self, or gender identity, comport with Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act and West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act were challenged by males who identify as females, claiming that these types of laws discriminate against transgender athletes. In each case, a male athlete who identifies as a female was allowed to compete against females, displacing women and girls across the board. According to West Virginia, over the last four years, B.P.J. (the party suing West Virginia) has taken “400 slots of women and displaced girls 1,100 times” in girls’ cross country, and track-and-field events.

Even when presented with this startling fact, the Court deliberated for over three hours, circling back to one inescapable foundational truth: there are two sexes—male and female.

Ironically, it was the female Justices who seemed most concerned about defining female-only sports categories based on biology. Through head scratching hypotheticals and semantic gymnastics around equal protection jurisprudence, they consistently urged the rest of the bench to adopt a complex legal test bolstering legal protections based on transgender status — to the detriment of women and girls.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson acted particularly confused about the definition of female, claiming the laws allow “Cisgender girls [to] play consistent with their gender identity, [but] transgender girls can’t,” implying that sex-based distinctions in sports are unlawful. Apparently, for Justice Jackson, policing these two distinct categories—male and female—is confusing. This is completely off base. Title IX alongside the state laws debated in the courtroom allow everyone the right to play sports. The only question is where: safely and fairly—based on biology, and for good reason. Male athletes hold clear physiological advantages in strength, speed, and lung capacity. That’s not an insult to women and girls; it’s science. A ruling that follows Justice Jackson’s reasoning would effectively end girls’ sports and break Title IX’s core promise to female athletes.

Justice Alito, on the other hand, cut straight to the heart of years of litigation in just one exchange with Hecox’s counsel:

Alito: “Is it not necessary … for equal protection purposes … [to have] an understanding of what it means to be a boy or a girl, a man or a woman?”

Counsel: “We do not have a definition for the court.”

Alito: “How can the court determine whether there is discrimination on the basis of sex without knowing what sex means for equal protection purposes?”

In a few crisp lines of questioning, he exposed the case’s fatal flaw.

Even under equal protection analysis, the court has held that “[physical] differences between men and women … are enduring.” Therefore, it is permissible for the legislature to take note that biology makes men and women different, and these differences have real world consequences.

Laws like Idaho’s and West Virginia’s do not discriminate against anyone, they simply make distinctions based on sex—that’s consistent with the Equal Protection Clause and Title IX.

As Justice Kavanaugh aptly noted, “[O]ne of the great successes in America over the last 50 years has been the growth of women and girls’ sports, and it’s inspiring … [F]or the individual girl who does not make the team or doesn’t get on the stand for the medal or doesn’t make all league … there’s a harm there, and I think we can’t sweep that aside.”

He is right. Rep. Barbara Ehardt, Idaho’s chief author of the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, and 206 other female legislators from across the country agree, including every female Republican legislator in Minnesota, from both the House and the Senate. True North Legal had the privilege of representing these women in an amicus brief filed in this case which tells the personal stories of these women’s hard-fought gains in the Title IX era. You can learn more about our advocacy in this short video.

After a lively oral argument this week, I am hopeful that the court will uphold the laws at issue in these cases, bringing us one step closer to ensuring justice for women and girls. But the real battle has always been much bigger than sports; it is the quest to upend objective truth and the reality that human beings exist as men and women, and whether we will remain free to engage in the simple act of telling the truth without punishment.

While the battle for our daughters to have the same opportunities as their brothers is very important, the foundational issue at stake is the truth. A government powerful enough to silence citizens speaking the truth is bad enough. A society that forces citizens to tell lies is not a free society at all. While progressive leadership in Minnesota keeps dodging the question, 2026 provides an opportunity for new leadership to seize the “What is a Woman?” moment and stop pretending that biology is optional.

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This op-ed was originally published via Alpha News.

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