What Girls Stand to Lose in the Supreme Court’s Title IX Case
Alleigh Marré /
The Supreme Court heard oral argument recently on multiple state statutes addressing the participation of transgender-identified male athletes in girls sports. What was once settled policy has become a national reckoning on identity, privacy, fairness, civil rights, and what it means to be a girl.
In the pair of cases from West Virginia and Idaho, the court is being asked whether states may limit participation in girls and women’s sports teams to females, or whether doing so violates Title IX of federal civil rights law.
These cases concern far more than team rosters. Title IX governs the entire educational environment, from classrooms and scholarships to housing, athletics, and the most intimate spaces on school grounds. It protects girls not only where they compete, but also in private spaces like locker rooms and bathrooms.
The court must decide whether Title IX will continue to protect girls sports and spaces as it was written, or whether males and females will be treated as legally interchangeable. The integrity of women’s sports, privacy, and dignity depends on the court choosing the former.
During oral argument this week, lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination requires schools to allow transgender-identified athletes (boys and men) to compete on girls teams if they identify as female. That reading deliberately perverts the true meaning of Title IX, and in doing so, disenfranchises the girls and women it was designed to protect.
Title IX was adopted to ensure that girls and women, who have natural physical differences from boys and men, had fair opportunities to compete and benefit from all that comes with athletic competition. Before Title IX, existing girls teams lacked funding, scholarships, and administrative support.
Before Title IX passed, women received about 1% of college athletic funding, and boys outnumbered girls in high school sports by more than 12-to-1. Within decades of the law’s passage, girls’ participation grew from fewer than 300,000 to nearly 3 million. Women now make up more than 40% of college athletes.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh described that growth as one of the “great successes in America.” He also noted the cost when a girl “does not make the team or doesn’t get on the stand for the medal” because a male has taken her place: “There’s a harm there … we can’t sweep that aside.”
Separate teams were created not as a courtesy but to give female athletes equal opportunities and protection as male ones. It is unthinkable that 50 years later, the law that demolished the foundation of inequity between the sexes is being used to rebuild it.
Chief Justice John Roberts warned during oral arguments that whatever rule the court adopts will apply to all areas governed by Title IX, “across the board and not simply to the area of athletics,” including classrooms, programs of study, housing, and Title IX’s protections against sexual harassment, assault, and other violence against women.”
If sex no longer matters in sports, it will not matter anywhere Title IX applies. What begins with athletics would quickly extend into every aspect of school life.
Unfortunately for many girls, this injustice is already real. On the field, that means losing championships, records, and scholarship opportunities to male competitors. It means training for years only to watch a podium or roster spot disappear, then being told that objecting is a form of intolerance or bigotry. Across the country, girls are being forced to accept policies that erase sex-based boundaries in the name of inclusion.
These losses are not limited to elite athletes. When a male takes a spot on a girls team, it is often the late bloomers, bench players, or those just good enough to make the roster who are cut. Their chance to participate disappears, along with their access to coaching, teamwork, discipline, and the physical and emotional benefits of competition.
Off the field, girls are being told to change clothes alongside males and to treat their discomfort as something they must simply overcome. A framework that once protected fairness and privacy is being replaced with one that elevates ideology over experience.
The court’s decision will determine whether states are allowed to protect their female citizens from that harm.
The Supreme Court does not need to settle every cultural debate about gender—our elected lawmakers must step up and do that. The court does, however, need to affirm that sex, when used in our law, means sex, and not self-identification, to protect women’s and girls sports. For more than 50 years, the law has protected girls by recognizing that sex matters in sports and in private spaces. And it matters just as much today as it did 50 years ago.
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