In September 2022, I had been looking forward to my next big step in life — heading off to college on a softball scholarship. But that dream came to an abrupt halt: During a girls’ volleyball game against a rival high school, I sustained traumatic head and neck injuries from being struck by a ball spiked by an opposing-team member, a male who identified as female.
While my sports dreams were gone for good, I knew that I didn’t want any other woman to experience that kind of physical pain and crushing heartbreak. That’s why I decided to stand outside the Supreme Court on January 13 while attorneys presented their oral arguments in two pivotal cases on men in women’s sports.
Both West Virginia and Idaho have signed legislation protecting female athletes from being stripped of medals and placed in vulnerable positions — or, ultimately, in danger — on the field of play or in the locker room. Those cases, West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, are now before the nation’s highest court, and the outcome will determine whether males who identify as women can play in female-only sports.
I was one of the athletes who could have been protected by such a law. When I was injured, I wondered why the adults in the room refused to protect me — and all of my teammates — from the obvious danger of competing against men. I concluded that people who stay on the sidelines of this issue are afraid of speaking out. They are afraid because cancel culture has taken many people from the height of their career to the lowest place in their lives.
Silence, however, is no longer the safe option. You cannot afford to sit on the sidelines while truth is being assaulted. If you cannot recognize basic biology, you have no credibility. You may be “canceled” for telling the truth, but without truth, there’s nothing left worth defending.
According to a study conducted by the United Nations, female athletes have lost 890 medals and counting in 29 different sporting categories because of men who claim to be female. I have met with and know other female athletes who have been stripped of their titles, who have missed out on breaking national and state records, and, worse, who have — like me — been injured because of the far-fetched idea that men can fairly compete against women.
But even if it was just one woman who lost an opportunity to chase her dreams, or if it was one woman who was left traumatized after changing in front of a man in a women’s locker room, that’s one woman too many. The plain fact is that women-only spaces should always be protected — without exception.
What further disturbed me as I listened to the oral arguments at the Supreme Court is that one of the Court justices, who is female, clearly suggested that women’s privacy, safety, and equal opportunity are negotiable. During the arguments in this historic case, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dismissed women and what it means to be a woman. You might think that Jackson, after hearing from numerous women and girls — those who have bravely spoken out about their own experience being faced with males in their private spaces — would see the obvious need, as Justice Samuel Alito so bluntly put it, to define “woman.”
Maybe I shouldn’t be so shocked and disappointed: After all, many Americans watched Justice Jackson’s confirmation hearing, during which Senator Marsha Blackburn asked Jackson, “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” Jackson replied, “No, I can’t.”
Allowing males to compete in female categories negates the principle of equality. Since the institution of Title IX, the United States has recognized that there are two separate but equal sexes. Title IX says, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
The key point is this: Title IX was explicitly created based on the criteria of sex, not gender identity.
But radical politicians and activists are attempting today to redefine what a woman is. For all of human history, the two sexes have been understood as male and female. Yet some of our elected officials and so-called experts now cannot — or will not — define what a woman is. This round-about attempt to outsmart or deny biology is not progress; it’s the embrace of chaos. It’s also a direct threat to women’s privacy, safety, and equal opportunity.
If the Supreme Court can’t acknowledge and define what a “woman” is, then the very class of people whom Title IX and countless other sex-based protections were written to protect ceases to exist in law. If you cannot define the word “woman,” then women have no rights left to defend. You cannot protect what you refuse to define.
This moment in history will define whether Title IX still means what it says — or whether it means nothing at all. The Supreme Court can either protect women as a real, distinct class, or it can green-light the erasure of women’s spaces and sports. There is no middle ground. If the Court chooses the path of denying biological reality, then we will see a complete dismantling of every protection that women, over many decades, have fought to secure.
The Supreme Court doesn’t need to reimagine women’s sports. It only needs the courage to defend the truth.