The US Supreme Court recently ruled that states may restrict participation in girls' and women's sports to "biological females," effectively excluding transgender athletes from competing. The decision, penned by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, upholds the legality of such bans under Title IX and the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, vindicating former President Donald Trump's 2025 executive order "Keeping Men out of Women's Sports." That order withdraws funding from educational programs that allegedly deprive women of fair athletic opportunities, framing trans inclusion as a threat to safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.
Bans Based on Flawed Science and Ideology
Judith Levine, a Brooklyn-based journalist, argues that neither the ruling nor the executive order has anything to do with privacy, safety, fairness, or dignity. Instead, they deprive trans athletes of these very protections. The science underlying the ruling, she contends, is far from the truth. A half-century of research has revealed the protean nature of sex, gender, and desire, supported by liberation movements, legislative reforms, and medical advances like safe contraceptives and puberty blockers. These have empowered women and trans people to live with greater bodily autonomy.
Religious conservatives, however, see this as a threat to a narrow, nostalgic norm. The ruling is part of a broader assault on bodily autonomy, following the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson, which allowed 21 states to ban or restrict abortion. Since then, Republicans have spent $215 million on anti-trans ads, and Trump has issued executive orders defining sex as binary and immutable, requiring identity documents to reflect sex assigned at birth, and moving to discharge trans service members.
Pseudo-Feminism and Pseudoscience
The right deploys pseudo-feminism and pseudoscience in this war. Anti-abortion activists invented fetal pain and post-abortion syndrome, while anti-trans discourse promotes a binary view of biology. Justice Clarence Thomas's concurrence argued that "sex is an immutable, 'biological' characteristic ... it is binary," and that trans people are not real, their existence a semantic trickery or delusion. Levine counters that humanity cannot be divided into two strict categories: some people are born with mosaic chromosomes or both male and female sex characteristics, and hormones like testosterone and estrogen do not determine athletic prowess. Trans people themselves prove that sex is not immutable.
The ideology behind the bans is darker: it seeks to eliminate trans existence bureaucratically, as seen in policies requiring sex markers on passports to match birth certificates. If a person is not considered real, the state has no obligation to protect their equality. Instead, their mere existence is framed as a menace, justifying policing and deprivation of liberty.
Levine concludes that, like all religious crusades, this one will not succeed in making trans people disappear or preventing women from terminating pregnancies. But the violence it inflicts will cause immense pain.
