SCOTUS yesterday heard oral arguments on cases from Idaho and West Virginia, Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., on laws barring boys/men from participating on girls/women's sports teams.
Alito asked Kathleen R. Hartnett, who is arguing on behalf of the Idaho student in the Supreme Court case, what it meant to be a "boy or a girl or a man or a woman" when it came to equal protection purposes. Hartnett agreed that a school may have separate teams for students "classified as boys and a category of students classified as girls." Hartnett also agreed there needed to be "an understanding of what it means to be a boy or a girl and a man or a woman."
"Sorry, I misunderstood your question. I think the underlying enactment, whatever it was, the policy, the law, we’d have to have an understanding of how the state or the government was understanding that term to figure out whether someone was excluded," Hartnett said. "We do not have a definition for the court. We’re not disputing the definition here.
"What we’re saying is the way it implies in practice is to exclude birth-sex males categorically from women’s teams and there is a subset of those birth-sex males where it doesn’t make sense to do so according to the state’s own interest."
Alito then asked, "How can a court determine whether there’s discrimination on the basis of sex without knowing what sex means for equal protection purposes?"
…… Alito then posed a hypothetical question to Hartnett about a boy who has never taken any kind of puberty blockers or other medication but believed they were a girl and whether a school can say the boy cannot participate on a girls’ sports team.
Hartnett suggested the hypothetical wasn’t necessarily what her side was arguing.
The issue at hand is whether laws in Idaho, and West Virginia, that prohibit transgender athletes who identify as women from playing on teams that match their gender identity, discriminate based on sex.…
Sounds exactly like what her side is arguing. https://www.foxnews.com/sports/alito-pr ... us-hearing