West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox

Reading of Justice Thomas concurrent opinion on this case:The Court correctly holds that neither Title IX nor theEqual Protection Clause prohibits States from offering sex-separated athletics. A man does not have a legal right tocompete against women just because he believes that he isa woman. I join the Court’s opinion in full. I write sepa-rately to make two points.First, transgender status is not a suspect class requiringheightened equal-protection scrutiny. United States v.Skrmetti, 605 U. S. 495, 547–557 (2025) (BARRETT, J., con-curring). The class of people who claim transgender statuscould more accurately be described as people who are expe-riencing “gender dysphoria,” which is not a “discrete group.”Id., at 550–551 (internal quotation marks omitted); see alsoid., at 566–567 (ALITO, J., concurring and concurring in2 WEST VIRGINIA v. B. P. J.THOMAS, J., concurringjudgment). Because “gender dysphoria” is a mutable men-tal state that is the object of psychiatric treatment, it doesnot resemble the immutable characteristics on the basis ofwhich our precedents have applied heightened scrutiny—race, sex, or national origin. Instead, gender dysphoria re-sembles other characteristics on the basis of which legisla-tures may classify with a merely rational basis. See, e.g.,Heller v. Doe, 509 U. S. 312, 321 (1993) (mental illness);Plyler v. Doe, 457 U. S. 202, 220 (1982) (immigration sta-tus). Legislatures have many obvious rational bases tokeep men who believe that they are women out of teamsand private spaces reserved for women.Second, as the Court recognizes, this case concerns “bio-logical men” and “boys who identify as girls.” Ante, at 10,27. Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women orgirls, even if they believe that they are. Sex is an immuta-ble “biological” characteristic, see ante, at 10; it is binary;and “man” and “woman,” “boy” and “girl,” are the terms thatcorrespond to adults and children of each sex. See A. Byrne,Are Women Adult Human Females? 177 PhilosophicalStudies 3783, 3786–3787 (2020). To use language to ob-scure reality—to show “indifference regarding the truth”—is to lie to the public and cease to treat our fellow citizens“as equal[s].” J. Pieper, Abuse of Language—Abuse ofPower 17, 21 (1992). Get full access to TransPreacher at transpreacher.substack.com/subscribe