Supreme Court to Decide if Boys Are Boys and Girls are Girls

Everything follows from this basic biological fact.

Next Tuesday, mere hours after the opening of the 2026 legislative session in Idaho, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Little v. Hecox. This marks the culmination of six years of debate and litigation over a simple question: can a boy become a girl?

A few months ago, I wrote about how America’s flirtation with transgenderism appears to be waning. It was during the height of the transgender fixation that Idaho took a stand for biological reality:

In 2020, with the COVID panic just over the horizon, Rep. Barbara Ehardt sponsored House Bill 500, the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act. Ehardt, a Division I basketball athlete and coach, saw the danger of allowing men who “identify” as women to play on women’s sports teams. As [Steve] Sailer noted in his article, the new zeitgeist was to believe that a man should be allowed to step into the boxing ring and beat a woman bloody—all in the name of equality.

Gov. Brad Little signed H500 near the end of the session, making Idaho one of the first states in the union to require that only women play on women’s teams in high school and college. Lindsay Hecox, a 19-year-old runner who had testified against H500 in committee, quickly joined the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a lawsuit against the new law. Hecox, a biological male who claimed to be a transgender female, demanded to run on the women’s team at Boise State University.

There are numerous legal questions at play in this case, as well as in West Virginia v. BPJ, which will be heard the same day. Attorneys for each side will argue over interpretations of Title IX, whether transgender-identifying individuals constitute a “suspect class,” and more. Yet behind all of these arguments lurks one defining question: can a boy demand that the world treat him as if he were a girl, and vice versa?

Over the last decade, Democrats—and a few Republicans—adopted the view that biological sex is malleable and fleeting. A young human being with XY chromosomes, who is on average stronger and faster than girls his age (or even older), can simply state that he is female, and the rest of society must accommodate that delusion.

This is not about edge cases involving genuine chromosomal disorders. We do not define a group by its margins—just as the existence of a baby born with six fingers on each hand does not make it false to say that humans are five-fingered beings.

The truth that the attorneys general of Idaho and West Virginia are defending is that guys are guys, girls are girls, and there’s no in-between. Even if a teenage boy takes puberty blockers, drugs, hormones, or undergoes mutilating surgery to remove his genitals, that does not transform him into a girl. He may begin to resemble a girl, especially if he adopts feminine clothing, but all the makeup in the world cannot change biological reality. That such a eunuch would demand to be treated no differently than real girls is an affront to nature and to the very idea of empirical truth.

The ACLU’s argument attempts to distract from this central reality. It begins with the premise that “male” and “female” are merely social abstractions rather than biological facts. From there, it suggests that the real issues are body mass, testosterone levels, and other physiological traits that themselves arise from biological sex differences between men and women.

For reasons that are still difficult to comprehend, the American Left went all-in on this delusion. Some are still clinging to it, like the last Japanese soldiers fighting World War II. The supposedly nonpartisan League of Women Voters even filed an amicus brief opposing Idaho’s law, which raises the question of whether they could define what a woman is. Recall that when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked that question during her confirmation hearing, she dismissed it with, “I’m not a biologist.”

Does anyone wonder how she will vote on these cases? The only real question is whether the margin will be 6–3 or 5–4.

In 1989, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of Title IX in response to a challenge brought by a young man known as Wade Clark, who wanted to play on his high school’s volleyball team. The school had no boys’ team and did not allow him to play on the girls’ team. In Clark v. Arizona Interscholastic Association, the Ninth Circuit ruled that schools had the right to prevent boys—due to obvious physiological differences—from competing for spots on girls’ teams. The court wrote:

If males are permitted to displace females on the school volleyball team even to the extent of one player like Clark, the goal of equal participation by females in interscholastic athletics is set back, not advanced.

Has biology changed since 1989? Would the court have ruled differently if Wade Clark had put on a dress and demanded to be referred to by feminine pronouns?

That decision also undercuts one of the Left’s most common arguments: that there are so few transgender-identifying athletes that it doesn’t matter. In 1989, the courts held that if even one girl lost her opportunity to play because a boy took her spot, that alone justified Title IX’s protections. I expect the Supreme Court to reach the same conclusion next week: if even one girl stands to lose her chance to play for her school because a transgender-identifying boy takes her spot, that justifies Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.

The question before the Supreme Court is simple, but its answer will have far-reaching implications. Is there such a thing as male and female? If the answer is yes, then everything else follows from that.

Feature image courtesy of the Office of Attorney General Raúl Labrador.