Supreme Court Defies Woke Commandments on Sex

It’s worth the time to read the entire Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. B. P. J., because this case may mark the beginning of the end of the gender ideology delusion.

In my book, “The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey),” the Fourth and Fifth are “You Shall Not Know What is a Man” and “You Shall Not Know What is a Woman.” The Court’s opinion in B.P.J. may give more people the courage to break those disordered modern commandments.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynhan, a Democrat from New York, said “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” He lived (1927-2003) at a time when Americans still had some core common values to carry them through the Great Depression, WWII, and the Civil Rights struggle.

Since Moynihan died, our country has split far apart on questions of politics, race, and sex. In barely a decade, the idea took root on the progressive Left that people could self-declare a “gender identity” based on a personal feeling independent of provable facts.

Gender ideology is inconsistent and self-contradictory. Though activists posit that there are unlimited “gender identities,” they fight hard to make everyone accept that “trans men are men” and “trans women are women,” thus enforcing a binary they claim to reject.

In our desire to be kind to, and include, people with “gender dysphoria”—which Justice Clarence Thomas described as “a mutable mental state that is the object of psychiatric treatment”—American media, schools, and institutions insisted that we accept each individual’s self-identified “gender” regardless of the impact it has on others, particularly females, whose protection and flourishing require separate spaces.

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This meant that males could compete against females in sports—not to mention get into their changing rooms, spas, prisons, and even rape shelters. Anyone who pointed out that this was illogical and unfair to females was vilified (see Exhibit A: J.K. Rowling).

Many of the worst consequences of enforced gender ideology were borne by girls and women. No man is afraid of “trans” men in a bathroom. No “trans” man ever stripped a sporting prize from a man. But women and girls were deprived of safe spaces and fair competition. Some states, including Idaho and West Virginia, passed laws to stop this.

West Virginia v. B. P. J. combined the cases of B.P.J., a boy identifying as a girl, and Lindsay Hecox, a man identifying as a woman. B.P.J. competed in sports in West Virginia grade school, Hecox in college in Idaho.

The question before the court was whether a state could restrict participation in sports based on biological sex, rather than gender identity. The plaintiffs claimed that state laws confining sports to one sex were discriminatory, based on Title IX, which prevents discrimination based on sex, and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

The plaintiffs essentially conceded the first point, that “sex” in Title IX originally meant what a person actually is—male or female—not what a person feels like. As Justice Thomas wrote in a pithy concurrence, “[s]ex is an immutable ‘biological’ characteristic … it is binary; and ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ ’boy’ and ’girl,’ are the terms that correspond to adults and children of each sex.”

The Supreme Court majority came down on the side of reality. Dissenting justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor argued that boys and men who block puberty with drugs or take opposite-sex hormones could be a subclass of “sex” that should be protected under the law.

But blocking puberty didn’t stop B.P.J., now 16, from growing larger and stronger than most girls.  B.P.J.’s mother, Heather Jackson, has used her child’s full name in the media for years. In a 2023 Harper’s Bazaar article, she described then 13-year-old B.P.J.’s “tiny shoulders.” Today, B.P.J.’s shoulders are noticeably broader, such that he recently won the West Virginia statewide championship in shot put. In high school shot-put, boys throw a 12-pound cannonball while girls throw one weighing only 8.8 pounds.

Taking hormones after puberty doesn’t simply undo difference in one’s height, breadth, heart, bones, or lungs. It didn’t shrink “Lia” Thomas to the size of Riley Gaines. Thomas went from ranked 500 or so competing as a man to winning national championships when swimming in the women’s category.

Justice Jackson attempted to elide the distinction between fact and opinion by using the term “sex assigned at birth.” This is a chimera used by gender ideologues to confuse.

It is possible, though rare, for a baby to be wrongly identified at birth due to rare mutations. But every single human being ever born is equipped to produce either small gametes (sperm) or large (eggs) and is thus male or female. In nearly all cases, this coincides with chromosomes and genitalia. The idea of “assigning” sex is a way of making it seem a choice, rather than a provable fact.

In her confirmation hearing, Jackson claimed she could not say what a woman is because she is not a biologist. But were she to read “The Ten Woke Commandments,” she would learn what any sentient human knows through observation by about age 3: Men are on average bigger, stronger, and faster than women.

The reason for separating males and females in sports is for safety and fairness, as Title IX was later clarified in the Javits Amendment. Safety comes into play when there is frequent physical contact, as in rugby, soccer, or boxing. Fairness matters when physical advantages make all the difference.

You might think that would be limited to sports where strength, speed, and size count most. In fact, sex-based differences matter even in archery, shooting, and snooker.

Chess is a nonphysical sport. Yet when I wrote my book, there was only one female in the top 100 ranked chess players, and today there are none. Could this not be due to some inherent difference between men and women, rather than entirely the result of bad coaching, lack of parental support, or institutional sexism?

There is no media trace of B.P.J.’s father. This is a telling absence. B.P.J.’s mother told USA Today, a champion of gender ideology, that her child “will grow into her own woman.”

One wishes B.P.J. all success and happiness as an adult. But that will not be as a woman, unless you define “woman” as anyone who so identifies. Perhaps a father could have explained that inescapable reality, instead of leaving it to the Supreme Court.