The Day the Supreme Court Asked “What Is a Woman”…and the Case Died on the Spot

In News of the Surreal, the New York Times ran a story yesterday headlined, “Supreme Court Highlights: Justices Seem Inclined to Allow States to Bar Transgender Athletes.” Seem inclined? It was an intellectual bloodbath. I suppose, at least, we must credit the ACLU for trying to defend one of the least defensible and dumbest legal arguments in American history.

🚨 HOLY SMOKES. SCOTUS Justice Sam Alito just EVISCERATED the attorney's argument for a transgender male trying to compete in girl's sports

Every word. Masterful.

ALITO: Let's say a school has a boy and girl track team. A male student with no puberty blockers or female… pic.twitter.com/Doejb48Jg4

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 13, 2026

There may be no better illustration of the insanity of the Millennium’s first quarter-century than the fact that the highest court in the world’s most powerful country was forced yesterday to debate whether mentally-confused boys are constitutionally entitled to play women’s table tennis.

The case involves an Idaho law requiring schools to enforce biological sex as the test for sports participation. Since Idaho Governor Brad Little signed it into law in 2020, lower federal courts have prevented the law from taking effect. That may be about to change.

Throughout yesterday, clips from the oral arguments were social media catnip. The most-quoted exchange from yesterday’s oral arguments might also be the most remarkable words ever uttered in the sanctified chamber where SCOTUS holds its oral arguments. Justice Alito asked the ACLU lawyer, “For equal protection purposes, what does it mean to be a boy or a girl, or a man or a woman?”

After some dissembling to buy time, the leftist lawyer stammered, “We do not have a definition for the Court.” They learned nothing from Matt Walsh’s hit documentary, What is a Woman?

🔥 It wasn’t quite the slam that social media thinks it is. The ACLU lawyer was inartfully trying to explain that she would, for the sake of argument, accept the challenged Idaho law’s definition of “sex,” and so didn’t need to offer any definition of her own.

But still. The fact that she couldn’t simply enunciate a straightforward answer, but had to hedge, distract, and dissemble, said everything needing to be said.

With that admission in hand, Justice Alito then drew his intellectual Katana and logically eviscerated transgenderism— SNICKETY-SNACK. In other words, he followed up by asking the ACLU whether a boy who truly believes he is a girl, but who never took any testosterone blockers, should be allowed to play against girls. This is where the whole sordid trans enterprise sputtered out. The ACLU lawyer properly answered no, as she must, to avoid taking the politically impossible position that it’s fair to let fully testosterone-fueled boys with stubbly beards and mustaches dominate girls’ basketball.

“Then,” Justice Alito correctly observed, “you ARE discriminating on the basis of sex.” He was emphasizing that even the ACLU agrees it is legally okay to stop biological boys from playing against girls— unless they take estrogen pills. In which case, the dispute is only about medication levels, not actually sex. And therefore, moronic.

Again, the ACLU lawyers aren’t completely brain-dead, they’re mostly deceitful. Without saying it out loud, their entire argument was that a tiny class of hormally-disabled boys who are medically similar to girls (in testosterone levels) are being discriminated against. Not even all transgenders. Just the medically castrated ones.

For reasons that should be obvious, they can’t say that out loud, because no one in their right mind would go along with it. But it didn’t matter; if the law could be struck down for that tiny group of people, it would also be struck down for everyone. Hence, it was more tricky and deceitful than ignorant.

But Justice Alito called her out on the SCOTUS carpet.

🔥 How did we get here? The “logic” of transgenerism crumples like a cheap Walmart suit when it faces even the most cursory intellectual challenge. How we got so far down this path of insanity to Supreme Court involvement was because progressives performed pretzel-like intellectual gymnastics to invent a whole new emotion-based vocabulary, allowing boys to be girls, girls to be boys, night to be day, up to be down, and wrong to be right.

In short, progressives took a common synonym for “sex” —gender— and split it off to accommodate transsexuals not just dressing like the opposite sex but —SHAZAM!— magically becoming the opposite sex through feelings.

For all human history until very recently, “sex” described the dimorphic distinction between male and female, regardless of species, from ferns to crabs to mammals, including humans. The term derives from the Latin root sexus (meaning “section” or “division,” but usually linked to division into male/female categories), and was ubiquitously used in biology, medicine, and natural history without any distinction from what we must now laboriously call “biological sex.”

“Gender,” by contrast, was a grammatical distinction. Gendered words, in some languages, are aligned with sex, like “rojo” versus “roja” in Spanish. Gender was also used as a polite synonym for “sex,” but referring only to the dimorphic sexual status of human beings. Cocker spaniels may be male or female, but they don’t have genders. Only gentlemen and ladies have gender differences.

In the 1950’s, progressive sex pests and second-wave feminists began using “gender” as a modifier —e.g. “gender roles”— ultimately leading to progressive re-definition of the word to mean psychological or behavioral sex in contrast to biological sex. In the 1980s, academics embraced the notion of “gender” as something distinct from —rather than synonymous with— biological sex.

Hence, trans-sexual evolved into trans-gender. Voilá.

Only by embracing this neo-Marxist wordplay can the fluidic concept of “trans-gender” survive. When you abandon the faux veneer of objective vocabulary, the internal logic vanishes into subjective, anti-scientific vapor, and you are left fumbling with totally subjective and unverifiable “lived experiences” and “harm reduction.”

It is more subversive than it might appear. At essence, transgenderism survives on the premise that “I feel I am a woman” is an expression of truth. But that is circular logic; it is a ‘truth’ only because the person subjectively feels it is true, reducing truth itself from a statement about objective reality to an expression of subjective emotion. So adopting “transgenderism” requires relegating truth to an unfalsifiable expression of intention— the opposite of what has been historically considered the scientific method.

Now the debate is at the Supreme Court, and the Times thinks the End is Near.

But the best prediction of how things are likely to shake out appeared on Sunday, when the Editorial Board of the Washington Post ran an op-ed headlined, “Trans athletes head to the Supreme Court.” The sub-headline crushed progressive hopes, saying, “Neither science, nor the American public, is on their side.”

Behold the op-ed’s astonishing opening paragraph, which referred to transgenderism as “one of the worst excesses of America’s cultural revolution:”

The phrase “cultural revolution” invoked Chairman Mao’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution in China following the communist takeover. If the Democrats at the Washington Post are distancing themselves from trans sports like that, you know it is well and truly over.

Read more