Supreme Court Should Smash This ‘Wilderness Of Mirrors’

On Jan. 13, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear two cases, State of West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, that ask the seemingly redundant questions of whether the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause and Title IX’s bar on sex discrimination in education allow states to reserve women’s sports for women.

While these cases narrowly focus on athletic competition, the stakes are even higher: whether the law will be allowed to reflect physical reality or must yield to artificial narratives imposed by elite tastemakers.

B.P.J. and Hecox represent the culmination of a broader legal struggle that has been waged for nearly a decade. In 2016, during the waning days of the Obama administration, the Departments of Justice and Education issued a joint “Dear Colleague” letter, reaching the counterintuitive conclusion that Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination “encompasses discrimination based on a student’s gender identity,” not just sex.

Four years later, President Joe Biden issued a sweeping executive order concluding that all federal laws barring sex discrimination should presumptively be read to “prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.”

The Biden administration aggressively sought to enforce this diktat. It issued a rule formally reinterpreting Title IX to encompass gender identity. It told universities that operated single-sex housing to admit men who identified as women to female dorms. It informed schools receiving assistance through the National School Lunch Program that they must comply with the new interpretation of Title IX or their students would go hungry. And when West Virginia and Idaho sought to protect their female athletes against unfair and dangerous competition by males, Biden’s DOJ argued that those commonsense protections violated federal law.

Since taking office in January 2025, President Donald Trump has rescinded the Biden executive order and made clear that the word “sex” in federal law “shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female” and does not “include the concept of ‘gender identity.’” However, the American Civil Liberties Union, as counsel for B.P.J.and Hecox, is now bidding to end the political back-and-forth by asking the Supreme Court to declare once and for all that the Constitution embeds protections for “transgender status.”

B.P.J. and Hecox ask the daunting but familiar question of whether a revolutionary vanguard can impose its views upon an unwilling citizenry by persuading courts to rewrite our fundamental law. At an even deeper cultural level, however, they ask whether the citizenry will be formed by laws that favor radical ideological narratives at the expense of reality.

These questions cut to the heart of our cultural moment. In his 1920 poem “Gerontion,” T.S. Eliot chronicled the confused musings of an elderly man, lost amid a “wilderness of mirrors.” His broader critique, however, of Western civilization as morally adrift among endless reflections, refractions, and distortions is doubly true today. For instance, generative artificial intelligence, which oftentimes merely tells us what we want to hear, holds the potential to “subtly confine us within ever-more personalized, yet constricting, realities” by serving as a digital “mirror reflecting and amplifying human intentions.”

The women’s sports debate and the transgender movement more broadly are symptoms of this moment, one in which we risk losing ourselves in an artificial reality constructed by others.

Take, for instance, the trope “trans-women are women,” a phrase that trans-activists commonly use to bludgeon those who disagree into compliance. Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson, a proponent of the radical transgender movement, explained that those who use this phrase are under no illusions that language can transform biological men into biological women.

“The world is not a social construct,” he notes, but “language is.” And language, he writes, is “a matter of conceptual categories, which are a choice.” And the choice the transgender movement wants us to make is to include men who identify as women “in the category of ‘woman,’ for people to call them women and treat them as women.”

Robinson’s argument overlooks the fact that playing linguistic games to embed false narratives in the law harms real people.

As the briefing in B.P.J. and Hecox demonstrates, allowing men to compete against women in sports has repeatedly denied women a fair and level playing field, depriving them of opportunities they rightfully earned through dedication and hard work merely because they are female. In addition, it threatens the safety of women, who are at greater risk of injury from men, who on average are physically larger, faster, and stronger.

Moreover, forcing men onto women’s teams has subjected women to bullying, intimidation, and overt sexual harassment. These consequences amplify exponentially as a distorted concept of “sex” moves beyond sports into other areas of law and culture, including prisons, women’s shelters, and the practice of pediatric medicine.

These compounding harms validate Trump’s observation that “the erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.”

If laws written to protect women and ensure equal protection can be twisted through linguistic sleight of hand to harm women and deny them equality, then we truly have wandered into a wilderness of mirrors with no certain path of return. The Supreme Court should not accept that invitation.

Ryan Bangert is senior vice president of strategic initiatives and special counsel to the president for Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal).