When the Supreme Court Has to Ask What Sex Means

A three-hour Title IX argument revealed how far the law — and the culture — have drifted from biological reality.

The Supreme Court, Title IX, and the Question That Should Never Have Been Asked

On Tuesday, I listened to more than three hours of Supreme Court argument on a question that would have seemed absurd when I was in law school — or when Title IX became law more than fifty years ago.

The question, stripped of euphemism, is this:

Can a state preserve separate sports teams for girls and women without violating the Constitution or federal civil rights law?

That this even needs answering tells us how far we have drifted — culturally, legally, and intellectually — from first principles.

What Title IX Was Supposed to Do

Title IX was passed in 1972 to remedy a simple and undeniable reality: women had been systematically excluded from equal opportunity in education. Athletics were not incidental to that mission; they were central to it.

Before Title IX, girls’ sports were often an afterthought — underfunded…