17 Simple Things You Need to Know About the 2 Women's Sports Cases Coming Up at the Supreme Court

Like Supreme Court for Dummies – Except You’re Not Dummies

Welcome back to Stronger Women. Happy, Healthy New Year to all. First, some invitations:

Join us at the Supreme Court steps in Washington, DC.
on January 13 for a rally starting at 10am.

And/or join retired Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice Elspeth Cypher, attorneys Glenna Goldis and Kara Dansky, and me for a live X Space gathering on January 8 at 7:00 Eastern time, hosted by Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender, to learn more about this case and what to expect.

Good news for non-lawyers: This is a legal-jargon-free zone: No injunctions, jurisdictions, petitioners. Just me, explaining. For a legal analysis, see What’s Happening With the Supreme Court Sports Cases? and other The TERF Report posts by Kara Dansky.

Now, here are 17 simple things you need to know:

1. These will be the first Supreme Court cases to address the transgender controversy as it pertains to women’s sports, which is why the courtroom will be packed and the steps of the Supreme Court will be packed and people will pack live-stream parties to hear the hearings – which you can do too. The Justices will not announce decisions until the spring, but you can tell a lot about what they’re thinking by what questions they ask.

2. We expect to win.

3. By “we,” I mean those of us who believe girls have a right to fair play, privacy, and safety.

4. By “girls” I mean girls.

5. By “win,” I mean the Justices are likely to rule that states are allowed to exclude boys from teams designed for girls.¹ If so, yahoo. We have been waiting for the Supreme Court to address this issue for a long time. The question is framed this way – about excluding male athletes from girls’ teams, rather than female athletes’ rights to all-female sports – because in both cases, a boy claims the right to play girls’ sports based on his trans identity “as a girl.” We’ll hear a lot from the ACLU about these boys, and what they think they deserve, and less about girls’ rights, unfortunately.

6. Perhaps reluctant to address this topic repeatedly, given all the other cases making their way through state courts, the Supreme Court might even rule that Title IX requires all-female sports teams.

7. They could even go so far as to legally define female based on biology, not male thoughts and feelings.

8. I’ll be there, at a rally on the Supreme Court steps, in the cold. Wearing a hat. In the past two weeks, I bought three winter hats: enough hats to make up for all the years when I walked around in the winter without a hat, complaining about the cold. This winter, I finally I had an epiphany: Hats work!

9. The first case, Little v. Hecox, involves a boy named Lindsay Hecox who ran track and cross-country at Boise State University “in her authentic gender,” as GLAAD puts it, which sounds like “in a Halloween costume” to me, because if you’re a runner all you can do is run, you can’t run in any particular belief or self-concept, and if you’re thinking too much about that self-concept, you’re not thinking about what you should be thinking about, which is running. Transgender is so poorly defined, the definition renders almost all women transgender,² and has not been legally defined. This young man also played women’s club soccer. Idaho was the first state to reserve female sports for just females by passing a 2020 law called the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, but Hecox was allowed to play anyway, due to legal rulings that have now reached the endgame: the Supreme Court.

10. The second case, West Virginia v. B.P.J., involves a then-11-year-old boy named Becky Pepper-Jackson who was medically prevented from going through puberty. West Virginia had passed the Save Women’s Sports Act, but Becky still got to compete in girls’ track and cross country in middle school and high school because the case was proceeding through the courts. Then, what a surprise: He qualified for a state track and field competition in discus and shot put as high school freshman. That would have been an impressive achievement for a girl. But he’s not a girl. Which is why this is heading for the Supreme Court.

    1. The rationale for puberty-blockers is that boys who take them can better pass as women when they grow up because, in addition to damaging sexual and reproductive functioning, puberty blockers diminish secondary sex characteristics such as beard growth. But whoops. His name is well known from media reports over the past four years. So much for passing as female. This kid should have been told, “You’ll always be a boy. Dress however you like. Love whomever you love.” (Most of these kids, if left alone, grow up to be gay.)

    2. ACLU lawyers will no doubt argue that puberty-blockers weaken boys to female levels of weakness. This is so insulting. Women are not weak. We are not men who have been medically damaged or disabled. Puberty-blocked boys still have taller, stronger bodies, as admitted even by trans-identified male researcher and physician and longtime male-inclusion-in-female-sports advocate Joanna Harper. In addition, these boys will never menstruate or give birth or nurse: female-related functions that have obvious impacts on sports performance. Women have unique bodies with unique needs.

    3. Pepper’s lawyers will also probably argue that certain boys need to compete against girls for their mental health. If this were true, girls who call themselves trans would need to compete against boys for their mental health. But they almost never do, because boys are faster, stronger, and taller. Girls stay in the female category, where they can enjoy fair competition, and virtually never complain about it. They deal.

11. Lawyers and Justices will stumble over language. ACLU lawyers will refer to boys as girls, as in, “We need to be fair to ‘all girls’ – when they mean actual girls plus boys who wish they were girls. Lawyers representing the states of Idaho and West Virginia – states defending their right to preserve all-female sports – are more likely to say boys when they mean boys. Referring to males as male makes a world of difference, as Martina Navratilova explained in this guest column.

12. The ACLU will likely raise the specter of genital inspections. This is a red herring. Sex tests (more accurately: sex screens) only involve cheek swabs (a Q-tip touched against the inside of the cheek), which are less invasive than covid tests, and far less invasive than drug tests, which require human monitors to watch urine flowing out of the body.³

13. Outside in the cold, there will be two rallies: Their side and our side.

    1. Our side will include a broad, bipartisan coalition: Do No Harm, Women Are Real, the LGB Courage Coalition, Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender, ICONS, International Consortium for Female Sport, Women’s Liberation Front, Women’s Declaration International USA, Alliance Defending Freedom, Independent Women’s Forum, ROAR Women NYC, and of course WSPWG, the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group. Olympic-champion attorney Nancy Hogshead, JD, Oly will speak for us, and for all girls and women, along with Tish Hyman and lots of luminaries.

    2. Their side will include lesbian and gay organizations (GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, etc.) that used to support lesbians but no longer do, and women’s groups (National Women’s Law Center, Women’s Sports Foundation) that used to support women but no longer do.

    3. Their side will invoke how vulnerable “trans kids” are to bullying. As if to demonstrate bullying, angry men claiming to be women will bring bullhorns and other noisemakers to intimidate us and drown out our speakers. Police will be there, but police at women’s rights rallies never seem concerned about women being aurally assaulted by bullhorns inches from their faces. Here’s a handy compilation by our friends at Sex Matters of more than 50 incidents of trans activist violence.

14. The media will refer to our side as “anti-trans,” “far-right,” or “Christian conservative,” and “hateful, bigoted, transphobic.” All false.

15. In preparation, I’m trying to choose my hat. One option is a trapper hat with a brim and two furry ear flaps. If I choose this hat, and you see video clips, look for the tall woman cross-dressing in a men’s deer-hunter hat. Can’t wait for reporters to ask, Were you born in the wrong body?

16. The decision will not be announced until spring, but one can get a sense of how the Justices will rule from their questions. To follow along, here’s where to find a link to the live audio feed that morning at 10:00 EST. The audio recording and a transcript should appear at that same link later the same day.

17. Reminder:

    1. Join us at the Supreme Court steps in Washington, DC. on January 13 for a rally starting at 10am. Bring a hat!

    2. And/or join retired Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice Elspeth Cypher, attorneys Glenna Goldis and Kara Dansky, and me for a live X Space gathering on January 8 at 7:00 Eastern time, hosted by Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender, to learn more about this case and what to expect.

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You might also enjoy these Stronger Women essays:

• Also, Women Menstruate.

• There’s Nothing More Manly Than Not Giving a F**k How Women Feel

• Guest Column by Martina: We Need to Refer to Male Athletes as Male

and you might want to subscribe to WSPWG’s:

Thoughts? I’m always curious. With love and courage, Mariah

1. In other words: They might decide that female-only sports teams violate neither the Constitution nor Title IX. The Equal Protection Clause is part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

2. The American Psychological Association defines transgender as “an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.” Which would include almost all women. The American Psychiatric Association, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Endocrine Society define transgender in almost identical ways – including gender (sex-stereotype) non-conforming behavior.

3. Olympic female athletes have actively advocated for drug tests to prevent cheating.