Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. The court held that Title IX, the 1972 federal law barring sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funding, does not require those schools to open girls' teams to biological males.
The West Virginia case began in 2021, when Becky Pepper-Jackson, then 11 years old, sued after the state barred her from the girls' cross-country and track teams at her middle school. Lindsay Hecox brought the parallel challenge in Idaho. Both were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, which called the ruling "heartbreaking" for its clients. West Virginia officials welcomed the decision as a vindication of the 2021 law.
Justices Gorsuch and Thomas each filed separate concurrences agreeing with the outcome. Gorsuch, who in 2020 wrote the court's opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County extending federal workplace protections to gay and transgender employees, wrote that Title VII and Title IX "ask different kinds of questions," and that Congress never "clearly and unambiguously" told schools accepting federal dollars that they must open single-sex teams to biological males.
A Question Older Than Any Statute
Nine justices spent months parsing spending-clause doctrine and the text of a 1972 statute to answer a question that, for most of human history, nobody thought needed answering. A girl is a girl. A boy is a boy. That the highest court in the land had to write dozens of pages to arrive back at what every mother has always known says less about the law and more about the age we are living in.
Scripture settled the matter before West Virginia had a legislature to pass a law about it.
"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)
Not male and female as a preference, my friend. Not male and female as a social arrangement that culture may revise when it grows uncomfortable. Male and female as the deliberate handiwork of a God who does not make mistakes and does not leave His creatures guessing about who they are.
The Body Is Not an Accident
The Psalmist did not write a legal brief either, but he settled something the courts still fumble toward: "I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works" (Psalm 139:14). A body, whether it grows up to run track in West Virginia or nowhere at all, is not raw material handed to a person to sculpt into whatever the heart desires that year. It is a gift, given on purpose, by a Giver who knew you before your mother did.
There is real compassion owed to a child like Becky Pepper-Jackson, who by every account did not invent the confusion she is living inside of. The church has no business sneering at a struggling child, and this newspaper will not. But compassion that agrees to erase the distinction between male and female is not compassion at all. It is surrender dressed up as kindness, and it costs the very girls it claims to help their medals, their locker rooms, and, in time, their confidence that their bodies matter.
The gospel does not begin with a ruling on Title IX. It begins with a Creator who made two sexes on purpose and called the whole of it good, and it does not end with condemnation for those who have believed the confusions of this age. It ends with a cross, where the God who formed every body in the womb absorbed the shame of every sinner who ever doubted His design, so that whoever comes to Him, however tangled their story, might be made new.