By John M. Grondelski
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on January 13 in the cases Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., regarding laws in Idaho and West Virginia that prohibit males who identify as women from competing in women’s sports. Most commentators believe the Court will uphold the state laws.
Mainstream media present the case simply as «women’s sports versus trans rights». That slogan is simplistic. Listening to the oral arguments reveals how far-reaching the gender ideology agenda really is.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers in these cases seem to recognize the headwinds they face. Public opinion remains skeptical, the higher federal judiciary is reluctant to invent new constitutional rights, and there is no longer a friendly executive branch committed to advancing transgender claims.
As a result, the plaintiffs presented a novel argument: that the laws are unconstitutional in their concrete application. That is, they are valid for practically everyone else—for example, the «99.9999 percent» of the population, a figure cited during the arguments—but unconstitutional when applied to their specific clients.
Their thesis is that these male plaintiffs are in a singular situation because they have not gone through a full male puberty. Lacking the physiological development that normally confers athletic advantages to males, their lawyers argued, the rationale for sex-based sports categories does not apply to them. Therefore, the state must recognize those boys’ supposed female identity and allow their participation in women’s sports.
The implicit argument is revealing. Sex-based sports categories are reinterpreted not as expressions of an irreducible sexual differentiation, but merely as regulatory mechanisms designed to avoid unfair competitive advantages. If such an advantage cannot be demonstrated in a specific case, the prohibition contained in the until-now all-encompassing category of «biological sex» must yield to self-identification. Heads, ideology wins; tails, biological reality loses.
The lawsuits against West Virginia and Idaho thus seek to protect transgenderism. The states, on the other hand, assert a more fundamental claim—in line with Catholic anthropology—that «male» and «female» designate biological realities that cannot be altered by self-perception. They are not costumes, masks, or social roles. We do not just have a body: we are a body, a composite of body and soul, in technical language.
As Justice Amy Coney Barrett observed during the oral arguments, there are no equivalent cases of women seeking access to competitive men’s sports. The reason is obvious: sexual differentiation produces predictable physical disparities that make such attempts futile. «Trans boys» (i.e., girls subjected to medical interventions) do not rush to join competitive men’s sports teams. That asymmetry exposes what the sports debate is really about. It is not inclusion, but the insistence that subjective identity must prevail over objective embodiment, precisely when doing so confers an advantage.
What is ultimately at stake is a question that courts or the political process are rarely asked to decide: whether states can reject the sex/gender split that subordinates biological reality to psychological self-identification. Accepting sex-based sports laws implies rejecting that distorted metaphysical claim. For advocates of transgender ideology, that concession to common sense is unacceptable, because abandoning the dichotomy undermines the entire framework on which the «trans» ideology rests.
Catholic theological anthropology seems firmly on the side of the two states. Modern Catholic theology, especially after the Second Vatican Council, affirms the omnipresent nature of human sexuality, which extends even to the genetic level. It also insists that the body is a constitutive element of the human person, not a disposable instrument used by the mind. The person is not a consciousness that temporarily inhabits matter.
Gender ideology is built on the rejection of both principles. The person is constructed from consciousness outward, leaving embodiment without normative meaning. In that framework, the Incarnation itself becomes incidental, and the biblical assertion that God created humanity «male and female» (Genesis 1:27) loses any binding sense. Reality is reduced to a state of mind.
The entire debate brings us back to the basic intuitions of St. John Paul II’s «theology of the body,» articulated nearly forty years ago. The Bible is, in a certain sense, prophetic about our days in its description of human creation. God’s decision to create human beings breaks the refrain of Creation in Genesis: «God made… and saw that it was good.» The creation of the human being is marked by two unique factors: divine deliberation («Let us make man») and certain attributes (being created «in the image and likeness of God»).
Therefore, human beings are not simply another interchangeable «species.» And consider also a third feature of the human creature: «God created man in his image… in the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them.»
There are many ways in which we reflect God, for example, through our rationality and our freedom. The biblical author does not highlight those, but emphasizes sexual differentiation as willed and intended by God. The «gender binary» is not a fungible biological accident or a social construct: it is part of God’s design of Creation and, specifically, of the image of God in man. It is against that fundamental intuition that these plaintiffs are lashing out.
As Ryan Anderson noted in When Harry Became Sally, this raises a question that remains unanswered: how can one be male or female independently of the body without reducing those categories to stereotypes? If masculinity and femininity are defined apart from biology, they become projections of cultural expectations, expectations that are otherwise condemned as oppressive.
It matters how sexual reality is constructed: from the outside in or from the inside out. The first, which has guided human societies for most of history, produces clarity and coherence. The second, demanded by gender ideology, generates ambiguity and contradiction. Sex-based spaces lose intelligibility. Sex-differentiated sports competition would then require medical certification. The law becomes incapable of drawing stable distinctions, certainly none based on ordinary human perception: is this a man or a woman?
The question before the Court, therefore, is not simply who can play on which team. It is whether civil law must treat bodily reality as subordinate to subjective identity. A society that answers affirmatively does not merely revise its sports policies; it abandons a coherent conception of the human person.
About the author
John Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is a former associate dean of the School of Theology at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. All opinions expressed here are solely his own.