Issue: Sex + Gender

Bronwyn Sims is the Southern New Hampshire Chapter Leader for Independent Women’s Network. Originally appeared in Grok! New Hampshire.

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How the Supreme Court Confronted Gender Ideology—and Why New Hampshire Must Follow Suit. When the Supreme Court convened this week to hear West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, the nine justices faced a question that once would have sounded absurd: must states allow biological males to compete in girls’ and women’s sports?

It is not merely a case about volleyball or track. It is the test of whether America’s legal system will acknowledge the physical realities that Title IX was written to protect—or replace them with a doctrine of identity untethered from biology, fairness, or common sense.

The Reality Check at the High Court

For months, activists framed these cases as battles for “inclusion.” But the arguments inside the Supreme Court chamber exposed something deeper: a movement built on denial.

Justice Samuel Alito asked the lead attorney for the trans-identifying athlete a simple, essential question: “What does it mean to be a boy or a girl, or a man or a woman?” The attorney paused, stumbled, and finally conceded, “We do not have a definition for the Court.” This answer, broadcast across the country, revealed the fatal flaw in gender ideology: in a courtroom charged with deciding how “sex” should be interpreted under law, the movement’s foremost advocates could not define the word itself.

Alliance Defending Freedom President and CEO Kristen Waggoner, who argued in support of West Virginia’s law, later noted another troubling feature of the day: several justices casually used activist language such as “cisgender,” as if it were neutral legal vocabulary rather than a deeply contested label. She emphasized that words shape law, and that adopting terms like “cisgender” effectively recasts women as a variant identity—rather than as the sex Title IX was meant to protect—while smuggling ideological assumptions into constitutional interpretation.

​Perhaps most striking, as Waggoner pointed out, was who went unmentioned in the courtroom. The women and girls actually harmed in Idaho and West Virginia—the athletes displaced hundreds of times by a male runner, the competitors facing increased risk of injury, the girls pushed out of their locker rooms—were largely invisible in the formal dialogue. Their lost titles, diminished opportunities, and compromised privacy existed as footnotes, not as the central civil-rights injury the Court was ostensibly there to address.

​Three years after filmmaker Matt Walsh’s What Is a Woman? challenged the public to confront the basic question that now stumped a Supreme Court advocate, the nation’s highest court found itself in the same position: ideology staring down reality—and losing the argument.

Science, Law, and the Limits of Inclusion

The legal issues at stake were clear. West Virginia and Idaho each enacted “Save Women’s Sports” laws to ensure that female athletic categories remain based on biological sex. The plaintiffs, males identifying as girls, claimed those laws violated Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause.

Supporters of the state laws, including the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS), IWN Independent Women’s Network and the Alliance Defending Freedom, cited decades of data: post‑puberty males maintain a 10 to 50 percent athletic advantage over females even after long periods of hormone suppression. These advantages arise from bone structure, muscle mass, lung capacity, and androgen exposure—facts of life, not ideology.

The ICONS brief warned that redefining “sex” to mean “gender identity” would “sound the death knell for women’s sport.” It’s not an exaggeration. In West Virginia, one male athlete displaced girls in competition more than 700 times during the injunction against the law. In North Carolina, volleyball player Payton McNabb suffered partial paralysis after a spike from a male opponent. These are not abstractions; they are warning flares.

Even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg acknowledged in the 1996 VMI ruling that “physical differences between men and women are enduring… the two sexes are not fungible.” Women’s sports exist precisely because those differences matter.

The Cult of Denial

During the hearings, progressive advocates reacted with what can only be called disbelief. When pressed about fairness, safety, or biology, they recited slogans about “affirmation” and “inclusion,” but offered no way to reconcile those values with objective performance data.

Outside the Court, one activist told reporters she didn’t see “why we split up sports” at all—insisting a woman could play basketball as well as any man if she simply practiced enough. It was a soundbite from another planet, and emblematic of what Matt Walsh called “the cult of denial” now consuming the Left.

This isn’t a debate over compassion; it’s a contest between truth and wishful thinking. A society that cannot define a woman cannot safeguard one, either on the field or in the law—and a Court that cannot speak plainly about sex will struggle to protect the very class Title IX was enacted to serve. Truth matters.

From Washington to Concord: The Stakes for New Hampshire

For women in New Hampshire, this fight is anything but abstract. In 2024, Governor Chris Sununu signed HB 1205, ensuring student-athletes play on teams that match the sex listed on their birth certificates. Yet a year later, Governor Kelly Ayotte vetoed HB 148, a broader measure that would have guaranteed single‑sex bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports.

That veto left women unprotected in precisely the spaces where fairness and safety collide.

Meanwhile, most recently the NH legislature advanced Senate Bill 268, grounded in the Independent Women’s Network’s Stand With Women model, defining “male” and “female” in state law and permitting sex‑based classification in sports, shelters, prisons, and similar facilities. The bill passed the House but awaits gubernatorial approval. Will Governor Ayotte sign the bill this time?

The public mandate could not be clearer. According to a May 2024 poll, 74 percent of Granite State voters—including majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents—support separate locker rooms and restrooms for biological males and females. Women and men alike overwhelmingly back clear sex‑based protections.

Yet the political class hesitates, fearing activist outrage more than the electorate’s will.

Voices from the Ground

As a coach, athlete, and Southern New Hampshire leader in the Independent Women’s Network, the stakes are visible in every gym and locker room. Girls competing against male athletes lose titles and scholarships; they lose the joy of fair play; they lose the privacy and dignity of female‑only spaces.

Our ICONS brief, signed by 135 women across sports, documents these harms. Swimmers forced to undress beside biological males. Cyclists and golfers losing podiums to male competitors. Coaches fearing professional punishment for speaking truthfully.

These aren’t “culture‑war” hypotheticals—they’re the lived fallout of policies that erase sex in law and language alike, and of courtrooms that speak in euphemisms rather than naming the women who are paying the price.

What the Court’s Decision Means

A ruling in favor of West Virginia would reaffirm what Title IX originally promised: equal opportunity based on sex. It would make clear that Bostock v. Clayton County, the 2020 employment‑discrimination case, does not override the physical realities that define athletic competition. States would retain the right—and responsibility—to preserve female categories for biological females.

A ruling against West Virginia would constitutionalize the concept of gender identity, forcing states to treat males as female for all legal purposes and dismantling decades of progress for women.

From the tone of the oral arguments, many legal observers believe the Court will side with reality and uphold women’s sports. But even the best decision in Washington cannot substitute for courage in Concord NH.

The Next Step for New Hampshire

In a state where nearly three‑quarters of voters back biology‑based protections, it’s time for leadership that reflects that consensus. Governor Ayotte’s veto of HB 148 in 2025 was a retreat. In 2026, she has the chance—and the obligation—to correct it by signing legislation that restores clarity, not confusion.

Our Southern New Hampshire chapter of the Independent Women’s Network is mobilizing for exactly that: letters, testimony, and local organizing to ensure that fairness and safety are not partisan values but shared principles written into law.

The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics recently adopted a model policy: the male category is open to everyone; the female category is reserved for those born female and not on testosterone. Simple, compassionate, and fair. It’s a roadmap for our state. Please DM me if you want more info.

Reality Reasserts Itself

The hearings this week made one thing plain: the ideology that tried to erase biology is out of arguments. When lawyers cannot define a woman before the Supreme Court, when activists deny the science visible in every Olympic record and every high‑school scoreboard, and when even justices adopt euphemisms like “cisgender” rather than speaking plainly, reality is already winning.

The question now is whether our lawmakers will side with it.

For the girls training in New Hampshire gyms and swimming pools, who dream of fair competition and safety in their own spaces, that question is everything.

Biology is not bigotry. Its fairness, safety, and opportunity—the foundations Title IX was written to uphold. The Supreme Court may soon declare that truth on a national stage. When it does, New Hampshire must be ready to act on it.