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Last week, the US supreme court ruled that states may restrict participation in girls’ and women’s sports to “biological females” and exclude transgender athletes from competing. In the past six years, 27 states have enacted such bans; before the court were challenges to West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act and Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.
The majority opinion, penned by justice Brett Kavanaugh, upholds the laws’ legality under Title IX, the federal statute that guarantees women’s equal participation in college sports, and their constitutionality under the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. It also vindicates Donald Trump’s February 2025 executive order “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports”. That directive withdraws funding from “educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy”. US policy, the order continues, will “oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth”.
Neither the ruling nor the order has anything to do with privacy, safety, fairness or dignity. In fact, the bans will deprive trans athletes of all of these. The science on which the ruling is based, moreover, lies far from the truth.
A half-century of science has discovered the protean nature of sex, gender, and desire. Along with liberation movements and legislative reform, medical advances – safe contraceptives, effective abortion pills, puberty blockers – have enabled people to live with more freedom and agency in their bodies. Among the biggest beneficiaries are women and trans people.
As religious conservatives see it, if you can’t tell the boys from the girls, nothing else makes sense. To deviate from a narrow, nostalgic, and (in reality) never-fixed norm is to mock God. It’s no wonder they are fighting to wrest the newfound bodily autonomy from women who don’t choose motherhood and people seeking to live in bodies consonant with their experienced genders.
The ruling on women’s sports, West Virginia et al v BPJ, was the Trump administration’s latest assault on bodily autonomy. In his first term, the president handpicked the justices to overturn Roe v Wade; in 2022, Dobbs v Jackson rescinded the federal government’s protection of women’s control over their reproductive destinies, unloosing 21 states to ban or impose draconian restrictions on abortion.
Two years later, Republicans have spent $215m on ads vilifying trans people. At a rally a month before his inauguration, the president-elect vowed to “stop the transgender lunacy”. Right after his swearing-in, Trump issued “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”, the executive order requiring the federal government to recognize only two, mutually exclusive, immutable sexes, and identity documents to reflect only a person’s sex assigned at birth, even if it differs from their current identity or appearance.
In February, following another executive order, the Trump administration moved to begin discharging trans service members; in May the supreme court allowed a ban to go forward. In June 2025, the same conservative bloc upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
An administration that is crushing government programs supporting women and girls, from Title X family planning to sexual assault prevention training, and disproportionately firing women, from civil servants to cabinet members, is now “defending women”. A man who says it’s OK to “grab” women “by the pussy” is blaming transgender schoolgirls for the “endangerment [and] humiliation . . . of women and girls.” A man who denied a sexual assault allegation before being seated on the court is writing the legal rationale for how a discriminatory ban is in fact rescuing fairness for women athletes.
Along with pseudo-feminism, the right deploys pseudoscience in the war on bodily autonomy. Abortion opponents invented fetal pain and “post-abortion syndrome”; they exaggerate both early-gestation viability and the medical risks of abortion. They recruit nature as an ally to the religious principle of gender “complementarity”: men are strong, women weak; men should lead and women submit.
Anti-trans discourse offers a similar pink-and-blue vision of human biology and relations. Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in the women’s sports case summarized the theory: “Men and boys with gender dysphoria” – the medical term for a misalignment between a person’s experienced sex and their sex assigned at birth – “are not women or girls even if they believe that they are,” he wrote. “Sex 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 ... To use language to obscure reality – to show ‘indifference regarding the truth’ – is to lie to the public and cease to treat our fellow citizens ‘as equal[s]’.”
In fact, humanity cannot be divided into two categories marked “biological female” and “biological male”. Some people are born with a “mosaic” of sex-related chromosomes, or both male and female sex characteristics – say, ovaries and testicles. Levels of testosterone and estrogen do not a man or a woman make; they don’t even determine a person’s athletic prowess. And trans people themselves are proof that sex is not immutable.
But just as junk embryology cloaks the intent to put adult women in their place, beneath the idea of binary biological sex lies a darker, meaner social ideology of gender.
Thomas makes the animus plain. The language of mutable sex obscures “reality”. Men and boys cannot be women and girls, “even if they believe they are”. Translation: trans people are not real; their existence is semantic trickery, or delusion.
To use such language, Thomas continues, is to “lie to the public and cease to treat our fellow citizens ‘as equal[s]’”. Trans people, he suggests, are not the public; they are neither us nor “our fellow citizens”. More than claiming equal treatment to which they are not entitled, they deprive others of equality simply by living as others do. Trump’s executive order “Men in Women’s Sports” transmits the same message: transgender women are men, period.
In antiabortion propaganda the figure of the unborn baby eclipses the pregnant person until her will, needs and rights disappear. Policies such as requiring sex markers on passports to match those on birth certificates don’t just disable trans people in navigating everyday life – traveling, driving, applying for a job. They bureaucratically eliminate trans existence.
If a person is not real, the state is not obligated to recognize their identity, much less protect their equality. In fact, if their mere existence constitutes a menace to society, the state has the duty to police their lives and deprive them of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Like all religious crusades, this one will find few willing converts. Trans people will not stop being trans. Women who don’t want babies will keep terminating their pregnancies. The crusade cannot succeed, but the violence it inflicts in trying will cause no end of pain.
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