In a healthy constitutional republic, courts interpret laws; they do not redefine reality. Judges are charged with reading legal texts, not resolving questions of basic human biology that ordinary citizens have understood for centuries. Yet our cultural moment has produced an inversion: courts are increasingly asked to decide whether obvious truths about sex still count as truths at all.
That tension was on full display during yesterday’s Supreme Court arguments challenging state laws in West Virginia and Idaho that reserve girls’ and women’s sports for girls and women. These cases are not really about athletics. They are about whether the law must affirm a fiction—namely, that biological sex is either unknowable or irrelevant.
Why Female Sports Exist at All
Sex-segregated sports exist for a reason. Biological differences between males and females are real, measurable, and consequential—especially in competitive athletics, where strength, speed, and endurance matter not only for fairness but also for safety.
Female sports were created precisely because competing against males would disadvantage women and girls. To claim that excluding males from female sports is discriminatory misses the point entirely. The distinction is not arbitrary; it is grounded in biology.
That is why these cases almost always involve males seeking access to female sports rather than the reverse. Males who identify as female are not barred from sports altogether. They are barred from competing as females.
Sex Discrimination—or Biological Reality?
The challengers argue that laws preserving female-only sports constitute unlawful sex discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause and Title IX. But this argument collapses on contact with reality.
Sex-based distinctions are not inherently unjust. The law has long recognized that some forms of sex discrimination are legitimate when they reflect real biological differences rather than irrational prejudice. This is why sex-based classifications receive less stringent judicial scrutiny than race-based ones. Biology is not bigotry.
Female-only sports discriminate on the basis of sex by design—and rightly so.
The Question That Ends the Debate
During oral arguments, Justice Alito asked the question that cuts through all the legal gymnastics: What does “sex” mean for purposes of equal protection and federal civil rights law? How can courts determine whether discrimination has occurred if they cannot define the category at issue?
The response was astonishing. The challengers conceded that they had no definition. Sex, we were told, has no fixed legal meaning.
That should have ended the case.
When Congress prohibited discrimination “on the basis of sex,” it used a word with a clear, public meaning—one rooted in biology and universally understood when those laws were enacted. If that definition governs, laws protecting female sports are plainly lawful. If federal law is silent, then states are entitled to define sex reasonably for themselves. Either way, a biological definition cannot violate federal law.
The Absurd Alternative
The only alternative offered is worse: a system in which schools must police hormone levels, medical histories, and bodily alterations to determine who qualifies as female enough to compete. Such a regime would be invasive, unworkable, and deeply unjust—especially to girls.
The truth is neither complicated nor cruel. Boys are not girls. Men are not women. A legal system that cannot say so is not advancing equality; it is abandoning reality.
A federal court in California has issued a decisive ruling that cuts through the fog of ideology and reasserts a truth as old as Scripture itself: parents are not optional in the lives of their children. In striking down “gender secrecy” policies in public schools, Judge Roger Benitez affirmed that neither the state nor school bureaucracies have the moral or constitutional authority to hide a child’s struggles from those entrusted by God with their care.
This case also exposes a troubling political and moral contradiction. Rob Bonta, California’s Attorney General—widely seen as positioning himself for a future gubernatorial run—defended these secrecy policies by arguing that parents must be excluded “for the child’s protection.”
The court rejected this premise outright, noting that it presumes parents are the primary threat to their own children.
From a Christian perspective, this logic is deeply inverted. Scripture consistently affirms parents as the primary moral guardians of children, not the state. A government that trains children to withhold intimate truths from their parents is not practicing compassion; it is undermining trust at the most foundational human level.
The irony here is impossible to miss. Progressives rightly condemned the Catholic Church for decades for fostering cultures of secrecy that isolated children from parental protection and allowed harm to flourish. Yet many of those same voices now defend gender secrecy in public schools—policies that likewise instruct children to conceal sensitive information from their parents. Secrecy was once understood as a danger. Now it is celebrated—so long as it serves an ideological end.
Judge Benitez ordered California to include the following statement in all relevant materials:
Parents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence. Teachers and school staff have a federal constitutional right to accurately inform the parent or guardian of their student when the student expresses gender incongruence. These federal constitutional rights are superior to any state or local laws, state or local regulations, or state or local policies to the contrary.
This ruling restores moral clarity. Care for children and respect for parents rise or fall together. When secrecy ends, truth—and genuine protection—can finally begin.
On October 22, 2025, a federal judge in Mississippi handed down one of the most significant rulings yet in the legal struggle over “gender identity” mandates. In State of Tennessee et al. v. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, Judge Louis Guirola declared that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had exceeded its statutory authority when it redefined “sex discrimination” to include “gender identity” under the Affordable Care Act.
The ruling does more than settle a technical dispute about regulatory authority. While the court’s purpose was to determine whether HHS exceeded its legal authority, its conclusion coincides with a deeper truth I affirm as a Christian — that our bodies are not social constructs or psychological projections, but part of the created order.
The law, in this instance, has returned to reality.
The Case: Tennessee v. HHS
In 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a sweeping regulation titled “Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities.” The rule reinterpreted “sex discrimination” to include five categories: sex characteristics, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex stereotypes.
That redefinition would have required states, hospitals, and insurance providers that receive federal funds to cover or perform “gender-affirming care” — including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries — regardless of conscience or medical judgment.
Fifteen states, led by Tennessee, sued. They argued that the rule went far beyond the authority Congress gave HHS in Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination “on the ground prohibited under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.” And as the court noted, Title IX’s meaning of “sex” is biological, not ideological.
The plaintiffs weren’t asking for special treatment. They were asking that federal law mean what it has always meant: that “sex” refers to male and female — not to self-declared identities.
What the Court Decided
Judge Guirola’s 26-page opinion is a model of clarity. He ruled that HHS’s 2024 rule:
Exceeded its statutory authority under Title IX and the Affordable Care Act.
Misapplied the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision, which concerned employment discrimination under Title VII, not healthcare or education.
Was unlawful in its entirety and therefore vacated nationwide.
The opinion states plainly:
“Congress only contemplated biological sex when it enacted Title IX in 1972. Therefore, the Court finds that HHS exceeded its authority by implementing regulations redefining sex discrimination and prohibiting gender-identity discrimination.”
The judge further held that the refusal to perform or cover procedures for “gender transition” is not discrimination “because of sex.” As he explained, if a doctor performs mastectomies for women with breast cancer but declines to perform them for patients with gender dysphoria, the distinction is not based on the patient’s sex but on the diagnosis itself.
In other words: medicine is about biology, not ideology.
Bostock Doesn’t Apply Here
The court’s analysis directly confronts HHS’s reliance on the Supreme Court’s Bostock ruling, which found that firing an employee for being homosexual or transgender violates Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination.
But Bostock explicitly limited its holding to employment law and said nothing about education, healthcare, or the broader cultural questions now before us. Title IX, unlike Title VII, contains explicit sex-based distinctions — for locker rooms, dormitories, sports teams, and bathrooms. Those provisions would be meaningless if “sex” were redefined to mean “gender identity.”
As Judge Guirola noted, interpreting “sex” as “gender identity” would create legal chaos. Schools could no longer maintain separate facilities for men and women. Sports competition would lose integrity. In the healthcare context, even legitimate medical distinctions — like sex-specific treatments — could be labeled “discrimination.”
That is precisely what the rule attempted to do, and why the court struck it down.
A Restoration of Constitutional Balance
Beyond the immediate issue of gender policy, this ruling restores a key principle of constitutional government: agencies do not have unlimited power to redefine law by executive fiat.
Quoting recent Supreme Court precedent (Loper Bright v. Raimondo), the court affirmed that statutes “have a single, best meaning fixed at the time of enactment.” Agencies are servants of Congress, not substitutes for it.
This is a vital reminder that the administrative state cannot function as an ideological laboratory for social experiments. The judiciary has begun to reassert the boundaries of delegated power, curbing the long pattern of executive agencies imposing cultural revolutions under the guise of “civil rights enforcement.”
The court’s language is unmistakable:
“Agencies do not have unlimited power to accomplish their policy preferences until Congress stops them; they have only the powers that Congress grants.”
That line deserves to be remembered.
Reality, Restored to Law
The court’s approach to statutory interpretation is refreshingly rooted in reality. Citing 1970s dictionaries, Judge Guirola observed that “sex” was universally understood to refer to biological distinctions between male and female. There was no concept of “gender identity” in 1972 law — because there was no such category in common understanding.
As simple as that sounds, it’s revolutionary in today’s legal landscape. The court refused to participate in the linguistic shell game that has corrupted public discourse. It chose to honor what words actually mean.
The Cultural and Moral Stakes
This case is not just about regulatory overreach or administrative law. It’s about truth-telling in a time of cultivated confusion.
For over a decade, we’ve watched federal agencies, medical institutions, and activist networks work to erase the distinction between man and woman — replacing embodied reality with subjective identity. In medicine, this ideology has demanded that doctors violate conscience, that parents affirm medical harm, and that the state compel participation in a collective fiction.
From a Christian Viewpoint: Creation and the Meaning of the Body
From a Christian perspective, this ruling affirms something far deeper than statutory interpretation. It affirms the created order.
Scripture tells us that humanity was made “male and female” (Genesis 1:27), and that this distinction is not arbitrary but sacramental — a sign of the divine image itself. As Notre Dame Professor Abigail Favale has written, the difference between man and woman “is not about completion, but communion.”
When law denies that created truth, it participates in what St. Paul called “the exchange of the truth of God for a lie.” The lie of our age is that the self is sovereign, that the body can be remade at will, and that nature itself must yield to the will of the autonomous individual.
This ruling marks a step back from that precipice.
Rejecting the New Gnosticism
Modern gender ideology, at its core, is a revival of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism — the belief that the material world is an obstacle to true identity, that salvation lies in self-knowledge detached from embodiment.
The court, perhaps without intending to, has reaffirmed the opposite: that embodiment is integral to who we are. Our bodies are not meaningless matter to be “corrected” by technology; they are the visible expression of the person God created.
When the judge wrote that Title IX’s use of “sex” referred to biological distinctions, he was defending more than a word. He was defending a vision of human integrity — one that law, medicine, and theology once shared.
True compassion tells the truth even when it hurts. The court did not deny anyone’s humanity; it denied the government’s power to redefine humanity.
Christians must remember: Love without truth is sentimentality. Truth without love is cruelty. But love in truth is the only path to healing.
This ruling doesn’t forbid care; it forbids coerced compliance with an untruth.
The Broader Implications
This decision will likely be appealed, but its reasoning aligns with the broader judicial trend of rejecting agency-driven redefinitions of “sex.” Other courts — particularly in the Fifth and Sixth Circuits — have already pushed back against the Biden administration’s interpretations of Title IX and the Affordable Care Act.
If upheld, the Tennessee ruling will shape how federal law treats sex distinctions in medicine, education, and beyond. It signals the end of a bureaucratic era in which ideology could rewrite biology by regulation.
For Christians and others who believe in the moral coherence of creation, this is not a moment for triumphalism but for thanksgiving and vigilance. The cultural pressure to conform to unreality will not disappear overnight. But truth has a way of resurfacing, and in this case, through the language of the law.
Conclusion: Living in the Truth
Judge Guirola closed his opinion with a reminder:
“Neither Defendants nor this Court have authority to reinterpret or expand the meaning of ‘sex’ under Title IX.”
The law is at its best when it reflects the created order rather than attempting to erase it. For years, American jurisprudence has been asked to pretend that male and female are mere social scripts. This ruling breaks that spell. For now.
In the words of St. Irenaeus, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” To be fully alive is to live in the truth of what we are — body and soul, male or female, created and loved by God.
