Kavanaugh wrote in the 29-page opinion that, "consistent with Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, we hold that the States may maintain women's and girls' sports for biological females. They may determine eligibility for women's and girls' sports based on biological sex." The ruling does not require states to adopt such bans, but it clears the way for the roughly half of the country that already has them on the books, and removes the legal cloud hanging over states considering similar laws.
The two cases involved a West Virginia middle schooler identified in court papers as B.P.J., barred by state law from competing on her school's girls' teams, and Lindsey Hecox, a transgender college student who sought to try out for the women's track team at Boise State University under an Idaho law passed in 2020. Lower courts had split on the question, with some blocking the state bans on equal-protection grounds before the high court took up the cases. The three liberal justices dissented.
Civil liberties groups that represented the plaintiffs said the ruling will cause real harm to transgender youth who want to play school sports alongside their peers. Supporters of the state laws, including attorneys general in West Virginia and Idaho, said the decision protects fair competition and safety in girls' athletics and restores what they called common sense to Title IX, the federal law that guarantees equal athletic opportunity for women.
What the Body Was Built to Say
Set the legal briefs down for a moment, my friend, and look at what is really being fought over here. It is not a question the courts invented. It is a question God answered before there was a Congress, a courtroom, or a track meet. He made two kinds of people, and He did not leave it to us to sort out later.
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." (Genesis 1:27)
That verse is not a policy position. It is the floor everything else stands on. Male and female are not labels a person can trade in when they no longer suit him. They are the handiwork of the Lord, stamped into the body at the very first breath, and no black robe and no statute can unmake what God has made. A nation that forgets this will spend its energy relitigating a settled fact of creation, generation after generation, and calling the argument progress. But here is where a man of God has to be careful, because truth without tenderness turns hard and cold, and that is not the spirit of Christ. The boy or girl caught in the middle of this argument, the young woman at Boise State, the middle schooler in West Virginia, these are not political props. They are souls for whom Jesus Christ hung on a tree. Scripture says of every one of them what it says of you:
"I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well." (Psalm 139:14)
The confusion of this hour did not begin on an athletic field. It began in a world that has told a generation their bodies are a mistake to be corrected rather than a gift to be received. The church's answer is not a lawsuit and it is not a sneer. It is the gospel, plain and whole: that the God who formed you in the womb loves you enough to tell you the truth about who you are, and loves you enough to have sent His Son to redeem you exactly as He made you. A court can settle who plays on which team. Only the Lord can settle what a person is for. That answer has never changed, and it never will, whatever the next ruling says.