The wedge on trans people moved exactly where we said it would. The people who gave it cover are still quiet.
Parker Molloy at The Present Age (07.01.2026):
Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that states can keep trans girls and women out of girls’ and women’s school sports.
The vote was 6 to 3, sort of. Six justices decided the bans don’t violate the Constitution. But on the separate question of whether they violate Title IX, the federal law against sex discrimination in schools, all nine agreed the answer was no. Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority, and the takeaway is that a state can decide who gets to play on a girls’ team based on what he called “biological sex.”
Then there’s the part where you can hear them straining to sound kind about it. Kavanaugh closed by assuring trans kids that their “desire to compete warrants respect” and that none of them should be “ostracized or vilified.” Clarence Thomas, in a concurrence, skipped the bedside manner. Trans girls, he wrote, “are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are.”
The West Virginia half of the case was about a girl named Becky Pepper-Jackson. She’s 16. She throws shot put and discus, she’s been on puberty blockers and estrogen since before her teens, and she never went through the testosterone-driven puberty these laws claim to be built around. She’s also, as best anyone’s been able to determine, the only person West Virginia’s ban has ever applied to.
The ruling clears the way for laws like the one aimed at her, already on the books in 29 states.
You already know how this gets covered: as a sports story. Kavanaugh the girls’ basketball coach, sounding a little sorry. A respectful nod to how decent people can disagree. A debate about fairness and biology, pre-booked for the Sunday panels.
I’ve written about trans athletes for more than a decade, and I’ll say up front that the sports question has some real complications (more on that shortly). But the people who spent years drafting these bills have said, out loud and in print, that they picked sports and kids because it was the easiest place to begin, and that they mean to go a great deal further.
So while everyone else argues about the shot put, I want to talk to a different group. For years, a certain kind of person has told me, and told themselves, that they aren’t “anti-trans.” They just have some “reasonable concerns.” Concerns about sports. Concerns about teenagers and medicine. And plenty of them treated those concerns as a reason to stay quiet while the restrictions piled up, on the assumption that this would all stop somewhere sensible.
This ruling is where that assumption comes due. The people who kept warning where this was going got called hysterical for it. And I’d like to know, from everyone who promised me their concerns were reasonable, whether they ever intend to say enough is enough, or whether the people they dismissed have been right the whole time.
Where I land on the sports question
Before I get to those people, I owe the sports question an honest answer of my own, because I’ve never been able to pretend it’s simple. So here’s the version that doesn’t fit on a chyron. Does a trans girl have some physical advantage over the other girls on the team? Sometimes. It depends on the sport, on whether she went through puberty on testosterone or blocked it early, on how long she’s been on estrogen, on a dozen things that vary from one kid to the next. At the top levels of competition, that’s a real conversation, and the bodies that run elite sports, the NCAA and the IOC and the rest, are a legitimate place to have it. I’ve said as much for years. And for what it’s worth, I think both of them folded to political pressure when they moved to shut trans women out, because nothing on the field had changed to make them. But that’s between me and the people who run sports.
This case was never about that.
By the time it got to the Supreme Court, the result was close to a formality. A year ago, in Skrmetti, the same six justices ruled that laws restricting this kind of care for trans kids only have to clear the lowest bar the law sets, the one almost nothing fails. Once that was the standard, a sports case built on the same constitutional claim was going to fall the same way. The Title IX claim was weak enough that even the court’s liberals rejected it. The court is hostile, sure. But this one was weak on its own terms, and it would have been a heavy lift in front of almost any bench. I’m not going to pretend a friendlier court would have saved it.
I can lose that argument and still tell you, flatly, that the court got it wrong. Both things are true at the same time. West Virginia passed a law that has only ever applied to one girl, and yesterday the court told the state it can keep her out. I think that’s sad, and I feel back for Becky.
The parts of this that can still be won are worth fighting for. The states that let trans kids play should keep letting them. The legislatures that protect those kids should hold the line. And when Congress tries to turn yesterday’s ruling into a national ban, which it already started with the Protect Women and Girls Act, that’s a fight worth having as loudly as we can have it.
Terry Schilling told you the plan
Terry Schilling runs the American Principles Project, one of the outfits that spent years writing and bankrolling bills like the ones the court just upheld. In early 2023, he told the New York Times what the group was really after. Its goal, he confirmed, was to do away with transition care entirely, for adults as much as for kids. Starting with kids was just, in his words, “going where the consensus is.”
He wasn’t being coy about the rest of it. That same year, lawmakers in Oklahoma and South Carolina were pushing bills to criminalize transition care for anyone under 26, felony charges included. Others, in those two states and in Kansas and Mississippi, would have drawn the line at 21. A 25-year-old isn’t a kid. Neither is a 21-year-old. The movement that swore it only wanted to protect kids was already writing adults into the bills, in 2023, where anyone reading the Times could see it.
So let’s say you meant it. Your worry really was just about a fair race, or just about kids and hormones, and nothing past that. Fine. Here’s some of what’s happened while you were thinking it over.
Start with the care, since that’s supposedly where the line sat. The federal government stopped covering hormones and transition surgery for its own employees this year, at any age. It’s proposed a rule that would pull Medicare and Medicaid from any hospital that provides that care to a patient under 18, which would drive it out of most hospitals in the country. And in March, a federal appeals court let West Virginia drop transition care for adults from its Medicaid program, on the theory that it would, in the court’s words, “encourage citizens to appreciate their sex.”
Then there’s whether the government will admit you’re who you say you are. On his first day back, Trump signed an executive order defining sex as fixed at conception and ordering every federal agency to swap the word gender for the word sex. New passports now carry the sex you were assigned at birth, a policy the Supreme Court let take effect in November. The Social Security Administration stopped processing gender-marker changes. Kansas told residents it had flagged as trans that their driver’s licenses would stop being valid the next morning, no grace period.
That last part isn’t abstract for me. A license or a passport with the wrong letter on it doesn’t stay in a drawer. It comes out whenever a bouncer or a pharmacist or a TSA agent asks for ID, and I don’t go around telling strangers I’m trans. These policies do it for me, in front of whoever’s next in line, and then I get to learn in real time how that person takes the news.
[...]
The fears were about words. Being forced to say “trans women are women.” Being made to say “chestfeeding” instead of “breastfeeding,” or to watch the word “woman” get retired from official forms. None of that happened. And the part that should have been obvious from the start is that none of it could. There’s no law that can put words in your mouth and make you say a slogan. Nobody had that power over you, and nobody was trying to get it.
The other side never pays it. They never had to show that trans women were wrecking women’s sports. They never had to show that Becky’s medicine had hurt a single person, or that the letter on my license put anyone in danger. They just said the word “protect” and pointed at us.
Parker Molloy gave an excellent response to SCOTUS’s anti-trans ruling in West Virginia v. B.P.J that permitted states to ban trans girls/women from girls’/women’s sports based on bullshit arguments about “fairness in girls’/women’s sports”: Laws harming trans people weren’t gonna stop at sports.
