On the final day of the Supreme Court’s 2025 Term, it delivered a resounding victory for biological reality. In West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, the court allowed West Virginia and Idaho to reserve women’s and girls’ sports for biological females.
The majority reached this outcome on two grounds. First, a unanimous court held that Title IX’s sports regulations authorize separate teams for each sex in competitive and contact sports. Second, the majority held that the state laws complied with the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
As part of the decision, the justices produced five separate opinions debating several nuanced legal questions. Beneath these is a smaller fight with enormous consequences: the words judges use to describe transgender litigants.
The opinions reveal three distinct approaches. The majority of justices referred to the plaintiff by initials (“B.P.J.”) and described the plaintiff as a “biological male who identifies as female.” In contrast, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent used female pronouns. Justice Clarence Thomas firmly stated that “[m]en and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are.” Thus, the opinions presented a spectrum of responses in the transgender debate: avoidance, affirmation, and rebuke.
Ultimately, this split poses a fundamental question: how should federal judges address transgender litigants? The correct answer is Justice Thomas’s approach. Judges should use the litigants’ biological pronouns and reject the semantic games of the transgender movement’s pronoun regime. Doing so upholds the role of judging and supplies resistance to the transgender movement’s hostile takeover of American institutions.
Judges Must Apply the Law to Facts
The role of a judge is to impartially apply the law to relevant facts. Inviting warped realities into that analysis defeats this purpose.
This approach aligns with the Founders’ vision for an independent judiciary and of the role of a judge. In Federalist 78, Hamilton explains that an independent judiciary — wielding “neither force nor will, but merely judgment” — is “requisite to guard the Constitution.” The judge is thus an arbiter of legal truth. A court that makes language conform to a litigant’s erroneous claim of identity abandons that duty.
Courts have sometimes used preferred pronouns as a courtesy. But courtesy is discretionary. And in this realm of discretion, judges must never subordinate their fundamental obligation to the truth to personal politeness.
Giving a practical example of this principle, the Fifth Circuit reached the same conclusion in United States v. Varner. There, the court denied a request of a litigant to be addressed with female pronouns.
Writing for the majority, Judge Kyle Duncan explained that no federal statute or rule requires judges, court personnel, or other litigants to use pronouns matching a litigant’s gender identity. Justice Thomas’s approach is therefore a clear application of an existing principle: courtesy may guide a judge’s tone, but it cannot dictate the court’s account of reality.
Preventing a Hostile Takeover By False Ideology
Adopting Justice Thomas’s approach also supplies resistance to the transgender movement’s hostile takeover of American institutions. The Varner scenario is the judicial front of this campaign, and the examples behind it show it has no limiting principle.
Consider the progression that has happened over the years. The first step began with the soft language of accommodation. For example, a university pronoun guide lists forms such as “ze” and “xem,” along with similar pronoun inventions. Each measure seems small, yet teaches all within the institution to treat self-declaration as authoritative. Once that premise is accepted, the vocabulary expands.
From there, benign accommodation mutates into enforcement. For example, New York City’s human-rights “guidance” treats refusal to use a preferred name or pronoun as evidence of discrimination in employment and public accommodations. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s 2024 harassment “guidance” took a similar path by treating repeated intentional use of pronouns inconsistent with a person’s gender identity as potential workplace harassment before the agency voted to rescind the policy.
The federal government also tried to write gender identity into Title IX. The Department of Education’s 2024 Title IX rule defined sex discrimination to include gender identity before a federal court vacated the rule.
Taken individually, each measure is presented as a small accommodation. Taken together, they are a mandate to affirm what is false. Thus, pronouns become a low-cost, high-reward instrument of power. The claimant announces a vocabulary; the institution assumes the work of enforcement; then everyone else bears the cost of dissent.
This is deeply troubling for the future of our country. Dialogue cannot exist when language is distorted. Words like “man” and “woman,” and “boy” and “girl,” assert biological truths. But when those words become meaningless, constructive disagreement dissipates since people cannot even agree on foundational premises that should be self-evident.
However, other judges, like Justice Thomas and Judge Duncan, demonstrate how to stand in the way of this erasure of the American practice of reasoned self-government through the means of free speech.
Judges have a duty that ordinary citizens do not always have. In a pronoun dispute, a private person might choose evasive language to avoid conflict at work. However, a court speaks with public authority. Its words settle disputes and create precedent. So if courts cave to the transgender movement, they give the compulsory pronoun regime the prestige of law. But if courts refuse, they mark a clear boundary that other institutions can replicate.
This is why courts should firmly reject motions asking judges to call a male “she” or a female “he” in the court’s voice. They should also never force litigants or lawyers to repeat words that contradict biological sex.
To be clear, no litigant should be mocked. Indeed, the court in B.P.J. agreed litigants should not be “ostracized or vilified.” However, respect does not require affirming blatant fantasies. The law can protect persons from abuse while refusing to conscript others into a lie.
Courts exist to say what the law is. That duty begins with saying what is true.
