The Supreme Court took up two pivotal cases on January 13, 2026 that cut to the heart of whether our laws will protect girls’ sports or erase them in the name of ideology. The arguments from Idaho and West Virginia challenged state bans that require students to compete on teams consistent with their biological sex at birth, and the justices spent hours probing whether Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause allow those protections to stand.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s questions during the hearings drew swift criticism from conservatives who say her line of reasoning blurred basic biological reality and, in effect, defended the idea that men should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. Commentators seized on her reluctance to offer a crisp definition of “woman” and framed her questioning as emblematic of a woke legal approach that favors identity claims over fairness for female athletes.
This isn’t just a courtroom skirmish — it is the latest front in a broader Democrat-driven campaign to subordinate sex-based distinctions to ideological preferences. When politicians and judges refuse to acknowledge the immutable reality of male and female biology, women and girls lose the protections Title IX was supposed to guarantee. Conservatives have argued throughout these cases that preserving separate competition based on biological sex is essential to protect opportunities women fought decades to secure.
The stakes are concrete: state officials and conservative advocates told the Court that allowing male-bodied athletes to compete in women’s sports undermines fairness and safety and can displace female competitors at every level from high school to college. The states’ position — that sports can and should be organized by biological sex to preserve competitive equity — found receptive questions from several conservative justices during oral argument. A ruling that backs the bans would restore common-sense lines around women’s athletics and stop states from being forced into ideological experiments.
Republicans and grassroots conservatives should not view this as a narrow legal fight but as a cultural battle for the integrity of women’s spaces and institutions. Lawmakers must double down on protecting girls’ sports and refusing to bow to the pressure to normalize policies that ignore biology. If conservatives win this argument — in the court of public opinion and before the bench — we can protect the next generation of female athletes from being pushed aside.
Hardworking Americans who care about fairness and common sense need to hold elected officials accountable and demand policies that preserve sex-based protections where they matter most. This moment calls for courage from conservatives in statehouses and on the high court: defend biology, defend girls, and refuse to let radical ideology rewrite the rules of sport and public life.
