The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on January 13 in the cases of Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., involving Idaho and West Virginia laws banning males who identify as female from competing in girls’ sports. Most commentators think the Court will uphold the state laws.
Mainstream media paints the case as simply “girls’ sports versus trans rights.” That slogan is simplistic. Listening to the oral arguments reveals just how far-reaching the gender ideology agenda really is.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs in these cases appear to recognize the headwinds they face. Public opinion remains skeptical, the senior federal judiciary is reluctant to invent new constitutional rights, and there is no longer a sympathetic executive branch committed to advancing transgender claims.
As a result, the plaintiffs advanced a novel argument: the laws are unconstitutional as applied. In other words, they are valid for virtually everyone else – say, “99.9999 percent” of the population, a figure cited in oral argument – but unconstitutional as applied to their particular clients.
Their claim is that these male plaintiffs are uniquely situated because they have not undergone full male puberty. Because they lack the physiological development that typically confers athletic advantages on males, their attorneys argued, the rationale behind sex-based sports categories does not apply to them. Therefore, the state must recognize boys’ asserted female identity and permit participation in girls’ sports.
The implicit argument is revealing. Sex-based sports categories are reinterpreted not as expressions of irreducible sexual differentiation, but merely as regulatory mechanisms aimed at preventing unfair competitive advantages. If no such advantage can be shown in a particular case, the prohibition encompassed by the hitherto all-encompassing category of “biological sex” must yield to self-identification. Heads, the ideology wins; tails, biological reality loses.
The lawsuits against West Virginia and Idaho thus seek to protect transgenderism. The states, by contrast, advance a more fundamental claim – one consonant with Catholic anthropology – that “male” and “female” name biological realities that cannot be altered by self-perception. They are not costumes, masks, or social roles. We do not merely have a body, we are a body, a body-soul composite in the technical language.
As Justice Amy Coney Barrett observed during oral argument, there are no corresponding cases of females seeking access to competitive boys’ sports. The reason is obvious: sexual differentiation produces predictable physical disparities that render such efforts futile. “Trans boys” (i.e., medically enhanced girls) are not scrambling to join competitive boys’ sports teams. That asymmetry exposes what the sports debate is really about. It is not inclusion, but the insistence that subjective identity must override objective embodiment – precisely where doing so confers advantage.
What is ultimately at stake is a question that courts and the political process are rarely called upon to decide: whether states may reject the sex/gender split that subordinates biological reality to psychological self-identification. Accepting sex-based sports laws entails rejecting that skewed metaphysical claim. For proponents of transgender ideology, that common-sense concession is unacceptable because abandoning the dichotomy undermines the entire framework on which “trans” ideology rests.
Catholic theological anthropology seems to stand squarely with the two states. Modern Catholic theology, especially after Vatican II, affirms the pervasive nature of human sexuality, extending even to the genetic level. It also insists that the body is a constitutive element of the human person, not a disposable instrument used by the mind. The person is not a consciousness temporarily inhabiting matter.
Gender ideology is built on the rejection of both principles. Personhood is constructed from consciousness outward, leaving embodiment without normative significance. In such a framework, incarnation itself becomes incidental, and the scriptural affirmation that God created humanity “male and female” (Genesis 1:27) loses any binding meaning. Reality is reduced to a mental state.
The entire debate brings us back to the basic insights from St. John Paul II’s “theology of the body,” articulated nearly 40 years ago. The Bible is, in some sense, prophetic about our days in its description of human creation. God’s decision to create human beings breaks the refrain about the Creation in Genesis: “God made … and it was good.” The creation of human beings is marked by two unique factors: Divine deliberation (“Let us make man”) and certain attributes (being made “in the Divine image and likeness”).
Humans are therefore not just another, interchangeable “species.” And consider also a third feature of the human creature. “God made man in his image. . .in the divine image He created him. Male and female He created them.”
There are many ways we image God, e.g., our rationality and free will. The Biblical author does not highlight those but does highlight sexual differentiation as willed and intended by God. The “gender binary” is neither a fungible biological accident nor a social construct: it is part of the divine design of Creation and specifically of man’s image of God. It is that basic insight at which these plaintiffs strike.
As Ryan Anderson noted in When Harry Became Sally, this raises a question that remains unanswered: how can one be male or female independently of a body without reducing those categories to stereotypes? If maleness and femaleness are defined apart from biology, they become projections of cultural expectations – expectations that are otherwise condemned as oppressive.
How sexual reality is constructed – outside-in or inside-out – matters. The former, which has guided human societies for most of history, yields clarity and coherence. The latter, demanded by gender ideology, produces ambiguity and contradiction. Sex-based spaces lose intelligibility. Sex-differentiated athletic competition would then require medical certification. Law becomes incapable of drawing stable distinctions, certainly none based on ordinary human perception: Is this a man or a woman?
The question before the Court, then, is not merely who may play on which team. It is whether civil law must treat embodied reality as subordinate to subjective identity. A society that answers yes does not merely revise its sports policies; it abandons a coherent account of the human person.
