The Story They Chose to Tell

The Court remembered why Title IX exists. The headlines revealed whose interests our culture prioritizes.

Last week, in What the Supreme Court Decided for Our Daughters, I argued that the Supreme Court had resolved the legal question surrounding Title IX while leaving a more difficult cultural question unanswered. Why had so many institutions become willing to reinterpret a law enacted to expand opportunities for girls as a mechanism requiring girls to surrender those same opportunities? I suggested that the answer lay beyond constitutional doctrine. It lay in a culture that too often rewards the appearance of compassion more than the exercise of responsibility.

I did not expect the first answer to that question to arrive so quickly.

The Supreme Court’s opinion in B.P.J. v. West Virginia and Little v. Hecox devoted the majority of seventy-seven pages to explaining why Title IX transformed educational opportunities for women and girls, why biological sex remains a meaningful legal category in athletics, and why female athletic classifications continue to serve the very purpose Congress intended when it enacted the statute in 192. The opinion repeatedly returned to equal opportunity, competitive fairness, and safety—not as abstract principles, but as the primary reasons girls’ sports exist.

Much of the reporting that followed, however, described a different story. The Associated Press announced, “Supreme Court upholds state laws banning transgender girls and women from school athletic teams.” The New York Times alerted readers that the Court had “allowed states to bar transgender female athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams.” CNN summarized the ruling as “Supreme Court lets states ban transgender athletes from playing on girls sports.” NBC News likewise reported, “Supreme Court upholds bans on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports.”

None of the headlines I saw adopted the Court's own description of the question before it. The opinion consistently framed the dispute as whether states may preserve women's and girls' sports for biological females. Much of the reporting, however, framed it as whether states may ban “transgender” athletes. Those descriptions arise from the same legal rule, but they are not the same story.

A decision about preserving opportunities for girls became, in the public telling, a story principally about the people who lost. That is not merely a difference in emphasis, but in moral perspective.

Justice Kavanaugh begins not with gender identity but with history, recounting the dramatic disparity in athletic participation before 1972 and explaining that separate female athletic categories were created not as exclusions from equality but as one of the principal means by which equality could finally be achieved. From that premise, the rest of the opinion follows naturally. If Title IX exists to remedy female disadvantage, then preserving meaningful opportunities for girls necessarily requires recognizing biological sex. Athletic competition is inherently zero-sum. A roster spot, a scholarship, a medal, or a championship awarded to one athlete is unavailable to another. Allowing males to compete in female categories therefore affects not only those seeking admission, but the girls whose opportunities Title IX was enacted to secure.

Last week, I wrote that we live in a culture that increasingly treats women's boundaries as negotiable whenever maintaining them risks appearing insufficiently compassionate. The reaction that followed points to something more fundamental. Increasingly, the boundaries themselves are no longer treated as the principal subject of the discussion. Public attention shifts instinctively toward the disappointment of those excluded rather than the interests those boundaries were created to protect.

The pattern extends well beyond athletics. Debates over women’s prisons frequently begin with the circumstances of the men seeking admission. Discussions about domestic violence shelters often center on the exclusion experienced by males who identify as women. Questions about women’s organizations increasingly ask whether membership restrictions make others feel unwelcome before asking why those organizations were created in the first place. The institution may exist because of women’s material realities, yet public attention is repeatedly drawn toward those seeking exceptions to its governing purpose.

This is not simply a matter of journalistic framing. It reflects a broader shift in our culture’s moral imagination. Increasingly, the measure of a women’s institution is not whether it fulfills the purpose for which it was created, but whether anyone experiences exclusion from it. The beneficiaries of sex-based protections gradually disappear from the center of the narrative, even when those protections themselves are reaffirmed.

It is difficult to imagine this instinct applied so consistently to other civil-rights laws. If a court reaffirmed legal protections against racial discrimination, we would not ordinarily frame the decision primarily through the disappointment of those denied an exception. We would begin with the purpose of the law and the class it was enacted to protect. Yet Title IX is increasingly treated differently, as though the central question is no longer what women need to achieve equality, but how preserving those protections affects males.

The Supreme Court did more than uphold state laws preserving female athletics. It restored women and girls to the center of a statute enacted on their behalf. Whether the culture is prepared to do the same remains in question.

The Court remembered why Title IX exists.

The headlines revealed whose interests our culture instinctively prioritizes.