When legislators started hearing that men were competing in girls’ sports, they acted.Twenty-seven states passed laws that said, in effect: Not on my watch.
Our girls have equal opportunity, and they will not be sidelined in their own sports.But a federal bill now moving through Congress could undo what those legislators, and the girls who stood up alongside them, fought to win.At Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), we have been in the thick of that fight for the better part of a decade.
We stood beside our client, Selina Soule, and her Connecticut teammates as they were forced to race against males and watched 15 girls’ state titles handed to male competitors.Theirs was the first lawsuit of many.We celebrated as President Donald Trump signed a groundbreaking executive order recognizing the biological truth of male and female and directing the federal government to keep men out of women’s sports.THE "PROTECT COLLEGE SPORTS ACT" HAS A FATAL FLAW: IT DOESN’T PROTECT WOMEN | RILEY GAINESAnd most recently, alongside Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador and West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey, we represented three female athletes in Idaho and West Virginia whose cases reached the Supreme Court.
On June 30, we won.The Supreme Court upheld both states’ laws and confirmed what most Americans already know: an athlete’s sex matters, and states can keep girls’ sports for girls.But that win came only after years of devastating losses.
In West Virginia alone, one boy displaced over 470 girls more than 1,400 times, including by taking a state championship.We know this terrain because we have walked it, legislature by legislature, courtroom by courtroom, for years.So when I raise concerns about the Protect College Sports Act’s potential effect on state laws protecting women’s sports, I do so as someone who has helped litigate these cases, not as someone watching from the stands. I have spent a legal career watching lawyers seize on every ambiguous phr...