“Before issuing today’s radical decision, the Court should have given some thought to where its decisions would lead… The effect of the Court’s reasoning may be to force young women to compete against students who have very significant biological advantages, including students who have the size and strength of a male but identify as female and students who are taking male hormones in order to transition from female to male.” Bostock v Clayton County (Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting).
When Justice Alito penned these words in 2020, many tried to dismiss him as merely exaggerating what the consequences of the decision would be. But here we are just five years later, and not only are more and more men invading women’s rosters, but many of the bureaucrats allowing it justify it by relying on the Bostock Supreme Court ruling, exactly as Justice Alito predicted.
But now that the Supreme Court has accepted two cases involving men in women’s sports, they have the opportunity to clarify the scope of Bostock and narrow its interpretation strictly to Title VII as originally intended.
Justice Neil Gorsuch delivered the opinion of the Court in Bostock, and with it loaded the legal guns of every anti-woman activist willing to bend Constitutional law to justify their violation of the clear language in Title IX. In Bostock, the Court held that an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII. The federal government clearly prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sex under Title VII, but the Court erroneously expanded these objective protections for the subjective terms: gender identity and sexual orientation.
Title IX allows for, and even calls for, sex segregation. This is reasonable and appropriate in this context. It is evident at its most basic form with restrooms, for example, but also grounds the efforts to expand women’s only opportunities for scholarships, admittance into college, and athletic opportunities. This is possible because the acknowledgement of sex gauges female inclusion in education.
The Department of Education under President Donald Trump issued a memo shortly after the ruling clarifying that the Bostock interpretation was narrowly confined to Title VII and shall not be used when enforcing Title IX. But in his first day in the White House, former President Joe Biden reversed this guidance and wielded Bostock to reinterpret all federal laws about sex discrimination to include discrimination based on “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” As you can imagine, the effects of this were catastrophic.
Women were left defenseless under federal law. Suddenly, ideologues could upend 50-year-old protections to replace women in education with men.
Thankfully, President Trump reversed this order nearly immediately in his second term. He clarified, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.” It is a big part of the reasons he won reelection.
But women deserve better than having their federal protections ping-ponged between administrations. It is time the Supreme Court clarify that Bostock’s reasoning should not be sweepingly applied across federal law.
In one of the most recent SCOTUS cases, U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Court declined to specifically address whether Bostock reaches beyond Title IX. But just a few days after releasing that opinion, they accepted two cases specifically regarding trans-related Title IX protections, Little v. Hecox and West Virgina v. B.P.J..
Let us pray for these important cases where the Court can finally clarify that Title IX protects women solely on the basis of sex, not gender identity. This will provide women the longstanding protections they deserve, no matter who controls the White House.
