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The Supreme Court on Tuesday authorized further discrimination against transgender students. In a split ruling on two cases about whether states could ban trans students from school sports matching their gender identity — Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. — the court ruled that it’s permissible to exclude trans students from the teams that align with their gender identity.

Fundamentally, both cases were about stopping trans girls from playing school sports. The court decided both cases together under the name West Virginia v. B.P.J. by ruling against both the Title IX and Equal Protection claims made by the trans students. In short, the Court decided that Title IX permits banning trans students by deciding that Title IX only pertains to biological sex, sex assigned at birth. The conservative justices also ruled that the equal protections guaranteed to all in the Constitution are not violated by state trans sports bans. 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her dissent, pushes back on that narrow understanding of Title IX, writing, “The majority is wrong to suggest that the term ‘sex’ in Title IX ‘cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.’ Title IX makes room for individuals to live in the gender they choose; it cares not just about sex assigned at birth but also about individuals’ ability to match (or not) their gender presentation to their gender identity. Because West Virginia’s law forces B. P. J. to live—in this case, to play—as a boy though she is a girl, it might well run afoul of Title IX properly construed.”

As a former teacher, a former principal, a former coach, and now an education professor, this ruling is painful. I’ve spent this Supreme Court term thinking about Cal, a middle schooler I met last fall. Cal, a transgender girl, is a kid who tried out for her school’s soccer team and made it (just like the rest of the team). We met when I was visiting a former student of mine who is now an assistant principal, doing the hard work of leading a school in a politically purple community. During my visit, I got to see Cal and her team scrimmage during soccer practice. 

The Court’s decision in these cases rests on four fallacies. Cal’s soccer season put a face to each of them.

The first fallacy is that trans youth are pretending to be trans

Cal is not pretending. That should not need to be said, but this ruling necessitates saying it. Trans sports bans are built on the assumption that transgender students — particularly transgender girls — are misrepresenting their gender identity in order to compete “unfairly.” There is no evidence for this. But, it is worth sitting with how outlandish that assumption is. 

The SCOTUS ruling clings to the notion of “biological sex,”  dismissing the overlapping reality of gender and gender identity. Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurrence calls trans girls “boys who identify as girls,” asserting that he knows they are actually boys and that to state otherwise “is to lie to the........

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