{"id":2535243,"date":"2026-01-13T16:01:02","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T21:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/gorsuch-barrett-buy-into-trans-ideology-in-girls-sports-case-4\/"},"modified":"2026-01-13T16:03:06","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T21:03:06","slug":"gorsuch-barrett-buy-into-trans-ideology-in-girls-sports-case-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/gorsuch-barrett-buy-into-trans-ideology-in-girls-sports-case-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Gorsuch, Barrett Buy Into &#8216;Trans&#8217; Ideology In Girls&#8217; Sports Case"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fgorsuch-barrett-buy-into-trans-ideology-in-girls-sports-case-4%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2535243&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The FederalistS Breccan F. Thies reports that during Supreme Court oral arguments over whether men may compete in women&#8217;s sports, Justices Neil gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett appeared to accept transgender-identifying language. Gorsuch suggested transgender people might qualify as a &#8220;discrete&#8221; protected group,invoking his Bostock v. Clayton County reasoning that treated anti\u2011transgender actions as sex discrimination. Idaho Solicitor General Alan Hurst pushed back, <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\" >arguing protected\u2011class status requires discrimination comparable<\/a> to that faced on the basis of race or sex. The piece notes the Court recently allowed states to restrict medical interventions for gender\u2011dysphoric minors in United States v. Skrmetti; in that case Barrett wrote that transgender status is not a suspect class because it is not immutable or sufficiently discrete. Despite her Skrmetti opinion, Barrett used terms like &#8220;trans girls&#8221; in the sports argument and suggested prepubescent boys have no physical advantage-a claim Hurst disputed with medical evidence. Thies warns the outcome on sports and Title IX could still swing either way, given Gorsuch&#8217;s Bostock authorship and Chief Justice Roberts&#8217;s concurrence.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, both appointees of President Donald Trump, appeared to be buying into &ldquo;transgender&rdquo; ideology during oral arguments for a case regarding men playing in women&rsquo;s sports.<\/p>\n<p>Gorsuch&rsquo;s major contribution to the Tuesday oral arguments thus far was relatively early on, when he suggested that people identifying as &ldquo;transgender&rdquo; should be considered a &ldquo;discrete&rdquo; group &ldquo;given the history of de jure discrimination against transgender individuals in this country.&rdquo; The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/gorsuch-barrett-buy-into-trans-ideology-in-girls-sports-case-2\/\" title=\"Gorsuch, ... Buy Into &#039;Trans&#039; Ideology In Girls&#039; ... ...\">justice essentially asked<\/a> whether those who claim to be &ldquo;transgender&rdquo; should be a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/historic-significance-of-georgia-senate-contests\/\" title=\"Historic Significance of Georgia Senate Contests\">legally protected class<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This really comes as no surprise for Gorsuch, who <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/news\/2708247\/biden-administration-using-supreme-courts-bostock-to-reshape-discrimination-law-nationwide\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">authored<\/a> <em>Bostock v. Clayton County<\/em>, which essentially invented a protected class for those claiming to be &ldquo;transgender&rdquo; with regard to Title VII workplace discrimination. <\/p>\n<p>However, in <em>Bostock<\/em>, he danced around the issue in an extremely strained and convoluted way by claiming that &ldquo;transgender&rdquo; discrimination was &ldquo;sex&rdquo; discrimination, since one would have to know the true sex of an individual in the first place in order to discriminate against a trans-identifying person.<\/p>\n<p>The Biden administration used that case to expand &ldquo;transgender&rdquo; identity into every part of its policy and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/exclusive-18-states-still-let-dudes-dominate-girls-sports\/\" title=\"Exclusive: 18 ... Still Let Dudes Dominate Girls&#039; ...\">enforce radical gender ideology<\/a> across the federal government and in states and localities that received federal funding. Many conservatives consider <em>Bostock<\/em> to be the worst decision since <em>Roe v. Wade<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Idaho Solicitor General Alan Hurst replied to Gorsuch on Tuesday that while there has been some discrimination, the reality is that a protected class needs to have encountered discrimination that mirrors the &ldquo;discrimination that &hellip; people have faced on the basis of race or sex in this country.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>The Supreme Court dealt with this issue to some degree in <em><a href=\"https:\/\/supreme.justia.com\/cases\/federal\/us\/605\/23-477\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">United States v. Skrmetti<\/a><\/em>, which allowed states to ban the use of chemical castration drugs and genital mutilation surgeries for children claiming to be a sex or gender that conflicts with their biology.<\/p>\n<p>In <em>Skrmetti<\/em> Barrett actually wrote a separate opinion, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, explaining why &ldquo;transgender&rdquo; identity is not a separate protected class.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;We have held that the mentally disabled, the elderly, and the poor are not suspect classes,&rdquo; she wrote, adding:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The Sixth Circuit held that transgender individuals do not constitute a suspect class, and it was right to do so. To begin, transgender status is not marked by the same sort of &ldquo;&lsquo;obvious, immutable, or distinguishing characteristics&rsquo;&rdquo; as race or sex. In particular, it is not defined by a trait that is &ldquo;&lsquo;definitively ascertainable at the moment of birth.&rsquo;&rdquo; The plaintiffs here, for instance, began to experience gender dysphoria at varying ages &mdash; some from a young age, others not until the onset of puberty. Meanwhile, the plaintiffs acknowledge that some transgender individuals &ldquo;detransition&rdquo; later in life &mdash; in other words, they begin to identify again with the gender that corresponds to their biological sex. Accordingly, transgender status does not turn on an &ldquo;immutable .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. characteristi[c].&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Nor is the transgender population a &ldquo;discrete group,&rdquo; as our cases require.&nbsp;Instead, like classes we have declined to recognize as suspect, the category of transgender individuals is &ldquo;large, diverse, and amorphous.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>However, despite Barrett&rsquo;s writing on the issue, in Tuesday&rsquo;s oral argument, she consistently referred to boys claiming to be &ldquo;transgender&rdquo; as &ldquo;trans girls&rdquo; and the like.<\/p>\n<p>While it is expected that the three left-wing justices will play word games like this &mdash; particularly Ketanji Brown Jackson, who famously claims to have no idea what a woman is despite being a woman herself &mdash; having a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/gorsuch-barrett-buy-into-trans-ideology-in-girls-sports-case\/\" title=\"Gorsuch, ... Buy Into &#039;Trans&#039; Ideology In Girls&#039; ... ...\">conservative justice give linguistic legitimacy<\/a> to the idea that men can become women or that there are people who are truly &ldquo;transgender&rdquo; is unacceptable.<\/p>\n<p>Barrett also <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/JCNSeverino\/status\/2011120192491786300?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">suggested<\/a> that prepubescent boys have no physical advantage over prepubescent girls, which Hurst quickly dispelled, pointing to medical evidence that boys do have advantages over girls even at such a young age.<\/p>\n<p>While the current Supreme Court majority ruled in favor of allowing state bans on the medical industry side of the &ldquo;transgender&rdquo; debate, the issue of sports and Title IX could end differently. After all, the fact that Gorsuch wrote the pro-&ldquo;transgender&rdquo; majority opinion in <em>Bostock <\/em>and Chief Justice John Roberts joined in that opinion sets up the potential for a 5-4 decision in favor of men in women&rsquo;s sports.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      Breccan F. Thies is the White House correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gorsuch and Barrett embrace transgender claims<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":179,"featured_media":2535244,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Screenshot-2026-01-13-134912.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[33229,42742,12186,32275,33412],"class_list":["post-2535243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist","tag-amy-coney-barrett","tag-girls-sports","tag-gorsuch","tag-supreme-court","tag-transgender-athletes"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Screenshot-2026-01-13-134912.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2535243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/179"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2535243"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2535243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2535247,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2535243\/revisions\/2535247"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2535244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2535243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2535243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2535243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}