6 July 2025 - 1:00pm
This week, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases about whether it is unconstitutional to ban transgender women from women’s and girls’ sports.
Only last month, in US v. Skrmetti, the conservative majority of the Court declined to name transgender people as a protected class. It also did not view denying “gender-affirming” interventions for minors, such as cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers, as a form of sex discrimination that violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause.
This no doubt shocked many of my fellow liberals who are hellbent on insisting that gender-affirming care is evidence-based, medically necessary and life-saving, despite evidence and amicus briefs unearthed in Skrmetti clearly dismantling those arguments. We seem unable to evolve in the face of evidence, likely because doing so requires admitting that, on this issue, Republicans largely have the science right.
In the case of transgender athletes, that science is pretty simple: there are males and females; they are not the same; one cannot actually change sex; and, on average, males have physical advantages over women. Some liberals refused to admit this even after University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a male who took cross-sex hormones and identified as female, won NCAA titles and towered over women on the podium in 2022.
For others, though, Thomas represented a turning point, when they began to see the fallout from policies that prized gender identity above sex. A number of these policies are now enshrined in some state constitutions. The conservative majority of SCOTUS will no doubt find barring people from sports based on gender identity constitutional, creating more cognitive dissonance for liberals: the same group which dismantled Roe v. Wade will now rule in favour of girls and women.
I admit I was initially sceptical of Trump’s heavy-handed rollback of policies which many liberals have come to see as trans rights. Though I agreed that we needed to re-establish the reality of binary sex (as Trump’s first executive order did), I felt each subsequent trans-related executive order was more aggressive and punitive than the last. I worried that each would meet with ferocious, litigious pushback, endlessly tying up the issues in court.
It seems I was wrong. Packing the Supreme Court with conservatives, rewriting Title IX, and withholding money from hospitals that offer sex-trait modification procedures to minors have had an enormous impact. Major paediatric gender clinics have closed. UPenn has had to apologise to the athletes forced to change with and compete against Thomas. An 82-year-old woman, barred for a lifetime from the YMCA after complaining about a male changing in the women’s locker room, won a $65,000 settlement — not enough to build her own pool, but still a victory for free speech and women’s rights.
What we don’t know is how many of these changes are happening against the will of institutions, and how many represent changes they’d wanted to make but didn’t have the courage to. Presidents Obama and Biden crafted executive orders and changed policies and laws, including Title IX, to make discrimination based on gender identity illegal. They, too, strong-armed institutions into compliance, threatening to withhold funding otherwise. Perhaps UPenn and various hospitals are simply going where the laws and policies take them. Or perhaps they’ve been searching for off-ramps, and it was Trump who finally provided one.
