Compassion Is Not Capitulation: Truth and Women’s Sports

By David W. Schitoskey

30 June 2026

The Supreme Court’s recent women’s sports decision did not create a new moral universe. It recognized an old one: biological sex is real, athletic differences between males and females matter, and the law does not require schools to pretend otherwise.

In West Virginia v. B. P. J. and Little v. Hecox, the Court held that Title IX allows schools to maintain separate women’s and men’s sports teams defined by biological sex. On the Equal Protection question, a six-Justice majority held that Idaho and West Virginia may maintain female athletic categories for biological females because safety and competitive fairness are important state interests. The ruling does not force every state to adopt the same policy. It rejects the claim that the Constitution and Title IX forbid states from protecting sex-based female sports.¹

That should not be controversial. It is the reason women’s sports exist.

If male and female bodies were athletically interchangeable, there would be no need for separate women’s teams, women’s records, women’s championships, or Title IX protections in athletics. The whole structure of female athletics rests on the recognition that biology matters. The Court recognized physical differences relevant to sports, including height, weight, strength, speed, endurance, jumping ability, safety, and competitive fairness. These are not slogans. They are physical realities.²

Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence cut directly to the point. He wrote that males with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, and described sex as biological, immutable, and binary. Fox News reported that conservative commentators praised those words as a “truth bomb.” They were right to call it that: not because the claim is extraordinary, but because saying it plainly has become rare enough to feel explosive.³^,⁴

Truth should not sound explosive. It should sound normal.

Yet public language has been so aggressively policed that saying “men are not women” is now treated in some circles as cruelty, bigotry, or even violence. That is an intellectually corrupt standard. A society that cannot speak accurately about male and female bodies cannot govern sex-separated athletics, locker rooms, shelters, prisons, or other intimate public accommodations with honesty.

This does not require contempt for people experiencing gender dysphoria. It requires clarity.

The American Psychiatric Association states that transgender identity is not itself a psychiatric diagnosis, while gender dysphoria is a DSM-5-TR psychiatric diagnosis referring to clinically significant distress or impairment arising from gender incongruence. The APA’s diagnostic guidance also distinguishes gender nonconformity from a mental disorder. The World Health Organization, using a different classification framework, places gender incongruence in ICD-11 under conditions related to sexual health rather than mental disorders.⁵^,⁶^,⁷

Those distinctions matter. Serious public argument should be medically precise. But precision cuts both ways. If a person suffers distress over his or her sexed body, that distress may deserve compassion, pastoral care, counseling, and clinical seriousness. It does not follow that every other person must deny biological sex, alter language, surrender conscience, or reorganize public institutions around a subjective identity claim.

Compassion is not capitulation.

This is the point too often lost in the current debate. The question is not whether a distressed young person should be mocked. No decent person should support that. The question is whether that person’s distress gives government officials, school administrators, athletic associations, or activists the authority to force everyone else to participate in an assertion they believe to be false.

It does not.

No girl should lose a roster spot, a championship, a scholarship opportunity, or the basic dignity of fair competition because adults are afraid to say that sex matters. No parent should be told that concern for daughters in locker rooms or contact sports is irrational. No coach should be forced to pretend that male athletic advantage disappears because the vocabulary has changed. No citizen should be compelled to affirm what he or she believes to be false as the price of public respectability.

The dissenters and activist organizations frame this ruling as exclusion. But every athletic category excludes. Weight classes exclude. Age brackets exclude. Varsity teams exclude. Disability classifications exclude. Women’s sports exclude males for the same reason they were created: to make female opportunity real rather than symbolic. Critics often point to hormone therapy as the equalizer that closes this gap. The evidence does not support that claim. Testosterone suppression reduces muscle mass and strength only modestly—peer-reviewed reviews of the clinical literature find the male strength advantage remains substantial even after years of treatment—and it does nothing to reverse the height, bone density, and lung capacity that male puberty already built. Hormones can lower testosterone. They cannot undo a skeleton.⁸

The argument for women’s sports is not an argument against kindness. It is an argument against dishonesty.

A humane society can treat people with gender dysphoria as human beings deserving of patience and dignity while still refusing to pretend that subjective identity overrides the embodied reality of sex. It can protect children from bullying without teaching them that biology is bigotry. It can offer help to the distressed without requiring women and girls to pay the price for someone else’s internal conflict.

That is the balance we have lost.

Thomas’s concurrence matters because it restores the first principle of honest public life: reality is not created by assertion. A male who believes he is female may be experiencing real distress. But distress does not alter biological sex. Sincerity does not erase the body. Internal conviction does not create a legal claim to women’s teams, women’s spaces, or women’s opportunities.

Women’s sports were built on truth. They can only be protected by truth.

And truth, plainly spoken, is not hatred. It is the beginning of justice. It is also the reason compassion was never capitulation to begin with.

Source Notes

1. Supreme Court of the United States, West Virginia v. B. P. J., 609 U.S. ___ (2026), consolidated with Little v. Hecox, No. 24-38, slip op. at 1-5, 10-21, decided June 30, 2026, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-43_2b35.pdf.
2. Ibid., slip op. at 10-21.
3. Ibid., Thomas, J., concurring, slip op. at 2-3.
4. Alexander Hall, “Conservatives hail Justice Thomas for ‘truth bomb’ about ruling protecting women’s sports,” Fox News, June 30, 2026, https://www.foxnews.com/media/conservatives-hail-justice-thomas-truth-bomb-ruling-protecting-womens-sports.
5. American Psychiatric Association, “Gender Dysphoria,” accessed June 30, 2026, https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria.
6. American Psychiatric Association, “Gender Dysphoria Diagnosis,” accessed June 30, 2026, https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/diversity/education/transgender-and-gender-nonconforming-patients/gender-dysphoria-diagnosis.
7. World Health Organization, “Gender incongruence and transgender health in the ICD,” accessed June 30, 2026, https://www.who.int/standards/classifications/frequently-asked-questions/gender-incongruence-and-transgender-health-in-the-icd.
8. E. N. Hilton and T. R. Lundberg, “Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage,” Sports Medicine 51 (2021): 199–214, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3.

Submission note: Source notes are included for editorial verification and converted to hyperlinks according to house style.