Sports: Justice Department Rejects SCOTUS Transgender Rule

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Getty Images/ Kelly Defina
Neil Munro

President Donald Trump’s justice department is defending women’s sports from an Idaho lawsuit by transgender activists — and from the Supreme Court’s new pro-transgender rule.

“Allowing biological males to compete in all-female sports is fundamentally unfair to female athletes,” said a statement from Attorney General William P. Barr.

The Idaho lawsuit was filed by transgender activists and progressive groups after the Idaho legislature passed a law barring biological males from female sports, titled the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.

That June 19 announcement comes four days after the five judges on the Supreme Court — including GOP nominee Neil Gorsuch — suddenly added the transgender claim to the 1964 law barring discrimination against women or men. The court insisted that a person’s rights are violated whenever they would be welcomed “but for” their sex, and is allowing lower courts to apply that open-ended rule in many areas of culture, such as schools, changing rooms, and sports.

In careful language, Barr’s statement argued that rule does not apply to athletics:

Under the Constitution, the Equal Protection Clause allows Idaho to recognize the physiological differences between the biological sexes in athletics.  Because of these differences, the Fairness Act’s limiting of certain athletic teams to biological females provides equal protection.  This limitation is based on the same exact interest that allows the creation of sex-specific athletic teams in the first place — namely, the goal of ensuring that biological females have equal athletic opportunities.  Single-sex athletics is rooted in the reality of biological differences between the sexes and should stay rooted in objective biological fact.

The transgender fight is one part of the campaign by progressives to rewrite American culture.

Progressives want to rule Americans’ society, so they need to wreck the nation’s evolved culture and civic rules that champion self-rule by individuals and by local governments.

That strategy of cultural destruction is aided by the progressive claim that a tiny percentage of people can be “transgender.” Once progressives create civil rights for a few transgender people, they can use many lawsuits to suppress Americans’ mutual recognition that men and women are very different, even as they are also complementary and equal.

Trump’s Department of Education is also acting against schools that do not protect women’s’ sports, and the housing department is protecting women’s privacy in shelters.

Barr did not mention the Supreme Court’s surprise decision. But Barr said the federal Department of Justice must protect women’s rights in sports:

In its statement of interest, the United States explains that the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution does not require States to abandon their efforts to provide biological women with equal opportunity to compete for, and enjoy the life-long benefits that flow from, participation in school athletics in order to accommodate the team preferences of transgender athletes.  Put differently, the Constitution does not require Idaho to provide the special treatment plaintiffs request, under which biological males are allowed to compete against biological females if and only if the biological males are transgender.

The Idaho law is based on the reality that male and female bodies are very different, said Barr:

the Fairness Act cites authority establishing that inherent physiological differences between men and women generally include a difference in “strength, speed, and endurance” that results in “different athletic capabilities,” which generally give men a significant advantage in head-to-head competition.

In a separate lawsuit, transgender activists are asking a federal judge to force the state to provide drivers’ licenses with the sex marker sought by people who say they are transgender.

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