While the 2026 World Cup was
underway in North America, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling, which
is to say, a judgment rationally argued, siding with member-states that did not
permit “Y chromosome” students in public schools to play in on “XX chromosome”
sports teams. Not being a writer who fecklessly evades controversial topics for fear of turning
away some readers, I will attempt to tackle the jurisprudence and ethics of male athletes
who self-identify as women playing in women sports such as American football in
public schools.
Because gender language had
become so muddled by enough people in at least some member-states even just for
ideological purposes, which is to say, to impose, I resort to
reductionism in highlighting chromosomes, which, after all, are empirical facts,
and, at least as of 2026 when the Court’s opinion was announced, the “Y”
chromosome stays for life. This is not to castigate or dismiss individuals
whose respective mental states include a close affiliation and even a group-identification
sense of self with the other gender. The cultural stereotypes of the widths of
masculinity and femininity had arguably contracted too narrowly since at least
the eighteenth century in the West that a young, slender man with long,
straight hair and a high-pitch voice in 2026 would likely conclude that he is
not masculine and even feminine even though everything about him that is
natural/biological would by definition be masculine (i.e., consistent with male
hormones and the related Y chromosome). This point should not be taken as
reductionistic concerning gender-identification, but I submit that the point is
often overlooked.
In ancient Greece, unlike in
Rome, bisexual or gay men who felt sexual pleasure in submitting in being
penetrated by a penis were regarded as just as masculine as men who penetrate
anally or vaginally. Perhaps Carl Jung would say that for the ancient Greeks,
both genders were regarded as containing animus and anima, albeit proportioned
differently. I contend that a man who is conscious of his anima has a fuller
sense of himself than a man whose self-awareness only consists of animus. Again,
this is not to explain or account for every transexual person, but, rather, my
intent is to widen the discussion even if doing so is beyond the
tolerable narrow limits of some ideologues who presume themselves and their
partisans alone as entitled to proclaim opinion as fact in contradistinction to
the mere opinions across the aisle.[1]
In terms of the U.S. Supreme
Court, the anima in a male person and the animus in a woman, is like a dissent
to a majority opinion. As a society, we ignore dissents at our peril,
especially as several majority opinions, such as “separate but equal,” have
been overturned. In her dissent in West Virginia vs. Becky P. Jackson, Justice
Sotomayor claims that the majority was “wrong to reject Jackson’s
equal-protection” (14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution) claim.[2]
Sotomayor admitted, however, “We just simply do not know scientifically that
transgender students pose dangers,”[3]
meaning that such students have physical advantages athletically over biological
women in playing in sports like (American) football, where body-size and
muscle-mass do matter at the line of scrimmage. According to the Huffington Post,
Sotomayor writes in her dissent that the facts show that transgender “women”
do not have an “inherent athletic advantage” over (biological) women, but a
strident ideology is indeed capable of inventing facts for itself while
accusing the other side of ignoring facts.[4]
That the X chromosome has over 1,000 genes, whereas the Y chromosome carries
only 50-200 genes, including the SRY gene, which furnishes instructions for the
development of distinctly male genitalia, suggests that women and men are
indeed biologically different in a myriad of ways, so the claim that biological
males do not have advantages in the conduct of sport may be dogmatic rather
than based on fact. This is not to say that every man is physically stronger,
as the 1970s tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billy Jean King demonstrated.
Perhaps the Court’s decision
comes down to the prime facie assertion that people with penises and testicles are
by definition exogenous to women sports. Furthermore, the equal
protection clause is not violated because nobody who was born with a penis (and
still carries the Y chromosome) can be on a women-only (XX chromosomes) team.
Just as in labeling a film’s lesbian sex-scene as homosexual, or gay, rather
than heterosexual because two vaginas and no penises are involved and the
mental states of the persons in the scene go only so far and thus do not alter
the label, so too do such states go only so far in terms of whether a person
qualifies to play in women sports. Not even if one person in such a scene has
had her female breasts (“boobs”) removed and is taking testosterone and sports
a mustache—neither boobs nor facial hair counting as sexual genitalia—is such a
scene heterosexual, for the sexual genitalia of the two people are the same, which
is to say, homo rather than hetero. Similarly, women sports
includes only people who were born with the same (XX) genitalia, regardless of
how the people have decided to appear externally and what mental state they
have. The underlying culprit is ideology, as per its inherently expansive
propensity at the expense of even legitimate constraints.
3. Ibid.
4. Sebastian Murdock, “Sotomayor: ‘Facts Do Not Matter’ to Supreme Court after It Upholds Trans Athlete Ban,” The Huffington Post, June 30, 2026.
