‘On the losing side’: Lawyer notes pro-trans attorneys’ desperation in Supreme Court arguments
The lawyers arguing for men’s ability to compete in women’s sports have begun to realize they have a losing hand, and it’s making them desperate, according to a lawyer on the other side of the issue.
“I think the other side is starting to recognize they’re on the losing side of this issue culturally, politically, in every way,” Matt Sharp, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, told The Daily Signal in an interview Tuesday.
Sharp spoke after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two women’s sports cases—West Virginia v. P.B.J. and Little v. Hecox—where the American Civil Liberties Union, representing male athletes who claim to identify as women, is challenging the constitutionality of laws protecting women’s sports.
The ADF lawyer said one particular argument demonstrated pro-transgender lawyers’ desperation.
“They’re starting to make the case, ‘Well, we’re really only talking about boys that … have been on puberty blockers or hormones or something, so that there is no sports advantage,’” Sharp explained.
(After a diagnosis of gender dysphoria—the painful and persistent condition of identifying with the gender of the opposite sex—some doctors prescribe experimental medical interventions. These include so-called puberty blockers—which are also used to chemically castrate sex offenders—cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to make a male body appear female or vice versa.)
The ADF lawyer pointed out the “flaws with that argument.”
“First and foremost, no amount of puberty blockers, no amount of hormones, no amount of surgery changes a man into a woman,” he argued. “Your sex is written into every single cell of your body.”
“To properly understand sex, you have to understand like it is intrinsically rooted in our physiology, our biology, our genetics, and nothing changes that.”
Sharp also claimed that studies show disparities in sports performance between boys and girls at young ages, such as 6 years old, long before puberty begins.
“So, even science undermines their argument that puberty blockers or hormones takes away this athletic advantage, because it does not,” he said.
“I think it’s a very disingenuous argument for them to be making at the 11th hour to try to narrow the case and say, ‘Well, we’re just talking about this particular male, or that particular male,’” Sharp argued.
“At the end of the day, the state has an interest to say no male belongs in women’s sports, no matter how you identify, no matter what drugs or surgeries you’ve done, we are going to preserve the integrity of the women’s category.”
The lawyer warned that “the moment you crack that door open and the one moment you allow one male to come in and say, ‘Well, he maybe doesn’t have as many athletic advantages,’ then does another male come along and say, ‘I’m not a good athlete, I ought to be on the girls’ team,’ and you end up with [men taking] the entire girls’ category.”
Pro-Trans Attorney’s Argument
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked ACLU senior counsel Joshua Block why, under his theory, a boy who isn’t competitive on the boys’ team couldn’t just play on the girls’ team.
“We don’t think the boys’ team is for better athletes and you have a back-up team for athletes that aren’t as good,” Block responded. “I think the purpose of the teams is to control for the variable of sex-based advantages so that talented women athletes have all the same opportunities as talented male athletes.”
Yet Block insisted that the plaintiff in the West Virginia case, Becky Pepper-Jackson, who goes by the initials B.P.J., has erased any biological advantage through sex-rejecting medical procedures.
“What has happened here is, by virtue of her [sic] medical care, B.P.J. has already controlled for those sex-based advantages,” the attorney argued. “So, she is completely in the position that she would have been if her birth-assigned sex were female.”
Female Athlete Weighs In
Sharp analyzed the cases alongside Selina Soule, a former high school sprinter and jumper who took the Connecticut Association of Schools to court because it forced her to compete against men.
“I know firsthand what it’s like to be forced to compete against male athletes,” she told The Daily Signal. “I had to race against not one, but two of them throughout all four years of high school in the short sprint events.”
“In the hundred-meter dash, the two of them would be at the finish line, chest-bumping each other while the rest of us girls were at the 80-meter mark,” Soule recalled. “So, it was just never a fair contest.”
She remarked that many transgender activists seem to think that “all there is to being a woman is just, you know, lipstick, long hair, and a pair of high heels.”
“It’s kind of offensive to us that they create themselves based off of a stereotype of women,” Soule added.
[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]