Will America put trans athletes in their place?

The debate is about basic decency, but decency begins with honesty.

Czech athlete Zdenka Koubková, holder of two world records, shortly after saying she identified as a man and took the name Zdeněk Koube, 1936.

Almost nothing in the history of American sports compares to the injustice of baseball’s color line. Of course, there were color lines in other sports. Black boxers were barred from the heavyweight title until Jack Johnson broke through in 1908. But the color line in baseball was different. This was America’s national sin cutting right through the heart of America’s national pastime. The whole country watched this game and when they did they saw themselves reflected back. When Jackie Robinson broke that line by taking the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, it was the greatest moment in baseball and one of the greatest in American sports. More than that, it was a great moment in our democracy. But if anything does compare to the color line, it’s allowing trans athletes into women’s sports, for nowhere else has bigotry in politics, whether it be racism against blacks or sexism against women, led to a greater share of unfairness in sport based on sorting athletes by demographic traits, whether it’s holding the color line or removing the sex line. But now, it seems, America might finally put transgender athletes in their place.

The momentum to this moment has been a long time building. In 2021, Laurel Hubbard became the first openly trans athlete to compete at the Olympics, representing New Zealand in women’s weightlifting at the Tokyo Games. In 2022, Canadian trans cyclist Veronica Ivy said on The Daily Show, with Trevor Noah nodding stupidly along, that he is a biological woman. “I am a woman,” said Ivy. “That’s a fact. All my identity records, my racing license, my medical records, all say female. And I’m pretty sure I’m made of biological stuff. So I’m a biological female.” According to such logic, if I can convince my doctor’s office to provide me with medical records saying that I am a tree, then because a tree is made of biological stuff and so am I, therefore I will biologically be a tree. This is like when children miss lunch and tell you they are “literally starving.” Or, more fittingly, when the government doesn’t pay for one’s cosmetic top surgery so trans activists call it a “literal genocide.” The trans journalist Emily St. James has argued, for instance, that denying trans-affirming medical care is a form of genocide, adding, just to be clear, “We don’t use that term metaphorically.

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Eventually, Americans grew tired of this stupidity. The three main reasons people didn’t vote for Kamala Harris were inflation, illegal immigration, and the trans issue. To quote Hunter S. Thompson, “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill … and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” In 2022, World Aquatics banned men from swimming against women. In 2023, World Athletics banned men from playing track and field against women. In 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to keep men out of women’s sports and the NCAA subsequently made men ineligible for women’s sports. It’s progress, sure, but not the kind of progress one celebrates. This is more the kind that makes you shake your head, like when Saudi Arabia ended the ban on women drivers in 2018.

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This past March, the International Olympic Committee decided that only women can compete in women’s events. Again, more “progress.” Now the sporting world waits to see what the United States will do. As it happens, the Supreme Court is currently reviewing laws in Idaho and West Virginia that prevent boys from playing on girls’ sports teams. These decisions will settle the trans debate in America for years if not decades to come. As CBS reported last week, “The cases are among the most closely watched of the term.” In one case, Little v. Hecox, a man named Lindsay Hecox is suing the governor of Idaho because he thinks not being able to play on the women’s cross-country team at his university amounts to unlawful sexism. In the other case, West Virginia v. BPJ, the mother of a 12-year-old boy named Becky Pepper-Jackson is suing West Virginia officials over a law that says her son cannot play track and field against girls. Both boys identify as girls and both plaintiffs claim the 14th Amendment, adopted so that freed slaves would have equal treatment under the law, should also ensure that boys receive equal treatment during tryouts for girls’ sports.

Also, notice that in order to claim one is the victim of sexism on the basis of being a boy one must begin by acknowledging that you are, in fact, a boy. Plus, before the Supreme Court could make its ruling, Pepper-Jackson won a girls’ state championship last week in the Class AAA title for shot put with a personal best of 38 feet 11.75 inches. The second-place finisher, or first-place girl, was Paisley Babiczuk who threw 36 feet 11 inches. That’s a difference of two feet. Putting that in perspective, this year’s Texas state champion in girl’s shot put won by a few inches. Yet we’re supposed to believe that not allowing this to take place is sexist … against the boys. And in case you’re wondering, the gap doesn’t narrow at the elite level either. The men’s world record in shot put is 77 feet 3.5 inches by Ryan Crouser, while the women’s world record is 74 feet 10.25 inches by Natalya Lisovskaya. That’s about 2 feet 5 inches. You might be thinking, 2 feet isn’t that much. Maybe it’s explained by better training for the men. Or more expensive equipment. Maybe women can close the gap! Except the men’s shot weighs 16 pounds while the women’s is less than 9 pounds. That’s right, despite throwing almost twice as much weight, the men still throw farther.

When it comes to the legal rights of trans people, the foundational precedent is the 2020 case Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the Court said discriminating against trans employees violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. But three months later, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, shifting the Court from roughly 5–4 conservative to 6–3 conservative. Stephen Breyer retired in 2022 and was replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson, maintaining the overall balance, so today’s Court is much more conservative, and we may see a different result. In the 2025 case United States v. Skrmetti, for example, the Court ruled 6–3 that Tennessee’s law restricting puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors with gender dysphoria does not violate the 14th Amendment because the law regulates treatment based on the purpose of the medicine, not based on the person’s sex. As Amy Howe writes at SCOTUSblog, these decisions suggest the Court is already questioning whether sex discrimination extends to trans athletes. And, CBS reports, the Court appears likely to uphold the bans in Idaho and West Virginia. I get this sense too, especially from reading Justice Kavanaugh’s questions during oral arguments. Kavanaugh, who has coached girls’ sports, at one point said:

I mean, I hate that a kid who wants to play sports might not be able to play sports. I hate that. But it’s kind of a zero-sum game for a lot of teams. And someone who tries out and makes it, who is a transgender girl, will bump from the starting lineup, from playing time, from the team, from the All-League — and those things matter to people big time — will bump someone else.

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In the end, the controversy over transgender athletes is not actually a dispute about sports. Sport merely provides the field upon which a much larger conflict has come into view. In all recorded history, little occasion ever arose to define what was meant by a woman. Just as many of our social norms now wash away in the hands of people other than those who formed them, our understanding of reality was similarly never bolted down by statute but simply assumed because it was observed. We don’t have laws for everything because we generally prefer to keep the government out of our business as much as we can. We fall back on norms to fill the gaps. This works very well if you have a society with high social trust, low corruption, and strong civic norms. Think of Nordic Lutheran societies like Denmark, Dutch Calvinist societies like the Netherlands, Confucian societies like Korea and Japan, or Anglo-Protestant societies like early America.

However, a norms-based liberal democracy won’t last long in modern Karachi or Mogadishu. They simply have the wrong set of norms. You can set up such a society in London or Boston, but it won’t last long if you invite a lot of people from Karachi or Mogadishu. Nor is this to say that any one group of people can lay claim to civic virtue. Like physical fitness or the ability to speak Japanese, you must invest the time to acquire the gift as well as the time it takes to maintain it. In the case of civic virtue, such work is done by schools, newspapers, books, movies, magazines, shows, music, and all the sundry engines of culturecraft, all of which are profoundly warped leftward in our current culture. And make no mistake, handing our institutions over to people who believe America is a fundamentally evil, white supremacist, colonial hellhole with a slave economy and a rape culture is going to have some predictably negative consequences. So now, for example, we find ourselves having to sort out whether math itself is racist or whether boys can turn into girls by closing their eyes and making a wish. If we keep at it, maybe we’ll be poking around in the dirt before too long.

That is why the Supreme Court decision on trans athletes is so important. Like the color line in baseball, this transcends sport and directly reflects the moral sanity of our nation, or lack thereof. Law did not invent the distinction between man and woman. It merely recognized it. Upon that recognition we formed institutions and protections to account for the realities of human biology. But just as illegal immigrants take advantage of our democratic norms, and just as we are hesitant to harden our society in the ways that would be required to stop this, so too have trans activists taken advantage of the better angels of our nature, preying upon the fact that we would rather just use incorrect pronouns than hurt someone’s feelings. We would rather just let someone use the bathroom they want than confront a potentially unstable person. We would rather just let little Johnnie play soccer with the girls rather than break his heart. And so, as a result of a million miniature surrenders, we find ourselves in the unusual position of maintaining institutions dedicated to women while hesitating to say what these entities we call “women” even are.

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Nor is the problem that Americans lack compassion. Few people object to treating transgender individuals with dignity and respect, if not love and affection. Many of us have trans loved ones in our lives. But the difficulty arises because institutions have convinced themselves that honesty must be sacrificed in the name of kindness. This is almost never the case. The fact that the Supreme Court is reviewing these laws in Idaho and West Virginia signals that America might be undergoing a moral awakening of sorts. Perhaps we have finally allowed things to go as far as they can in the name of kindness. Perhaps soft men have made these times hard enough. Perhaps America is finally beginning to assert its foundational civic values. We do not have to remain Anglo-Protestant to thrive. But we do have to hold onto a certain constellation of values and norms, one of them being an unapologetic pursuit of the truth.

You know, it’s amazing how modern Aristophanes can feel. Consider The Frogs, his masterpiece, about a declining Athens that has lost touch with its founding virtues as political polarization and the incompetence of institutions tear its society apart. Go back and read that one afternoon, see if it doesn’t give you chills. Or how about The Clouds, about an Athenian father who takes classes from Socrates himself to learn how to argue his way out of debt. In one class, Logic personified defends traditional Greek virtues such as respect for authority, but Logic loses the debate to Illogic, who says people should just do whatever makes them happy. The father’s son takes the class and becomes a brilliant sophist who can prove anything but believes in nothing. The son even uses his newfound debate skills to justify physically beating his father. The old man realizes too late that intellectualism is poison if it is not grounded in reality, and that an entire society can become sociopathic if its people lose the ability to recognize obvious facts. We have listened far too long to lectures by the likes of Illogic and our youth have come home to us corrupted and lost. No, you should not just do whatever makes you happy. No, you cannot be whatever you want to be.

Every age develops orthodoxies that appear too delicate to examine. The people who question them are often accused not merely of error but of immorality. The vast majority of trans activists, were they to read this, would conclude that I am a hateful bigot. Their inability to engage in good faith is a significant part of the reason why their cause is falling apart in front of us. We have to always remember that no society preserves its intellectual integrity by forbidding inquiry into the foundations of its own beliefs. No belief is beyond challenge. Especially beliefs that are guarded by outrage and offense. Especially when those beliefs fly in the face of basic biology. It will unfortunately be a long way out of this mess, but the world will be a safer and fairer place for women athletes when we get there.