On the final day of the Supreme Court’s 2025 term, the Court 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.
In all, the Justices produced five separate opinions. Those opinions debated several nuanced legal questions. However, beneath them ran a smaller fight with enormous consequences: the words judges used to describe the transgender litigants.
Taken individually, each measure is defended as a small accommodation. Taken together, they are a mandate to affirm what is false.
There were three distinct approaches. The majority generally referred to the plaintiff by initials (“B.P.J.”) and described the plaintiff as a “biological male who identifies as female.” In contrast, Justice Sotomayor’s dissent used female pronouns. Finally, Justice 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 to the transgender movement: 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.
This is the case for two reasons. First, it upholds the role of judging. Second, it supplies resistance to the transgender movement’s hostile takeover of American institutions.
First, the role of a judge is to impartially apply the law to facts. And inviting warped realities into that analysis defeats this purpose.
This approach aligns with the Founders’ vision for an independent judiciary and the role of a judge. In Federalist 78, Hamilton explained 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. Accordingly, a court that makes language conform to a litigant’s erroneous identity claim abandons that duty.
For a legal justification, 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.
For 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 required 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.
Second, adopting Justice Thomas’s approach supplies resistance to the transgender movement’s hostile takeover of American institutions. The Varner example is the judicial front of this campaign, and the examples behind it show that it has no limiting principle.
Consider the progression.
The first step begins 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 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 EEOC’s 2024 harassment guidance took a similar path by treating repeated intentional pronoun use inconsistent with gender identity as potential workplace harassment before the agency voted to rescind that guidance. The federal government also tried to write gender identity into Title IX policy: 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 defended 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; and then everyone else bears the cost of dissent.
This is deeply troubling for the future of this country. In today’s polarized society, productive debate is very important. However, dialogue cannot materialize 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.
However, other judges, like Justice Thomas and Judge Duncan, can stand in the way.
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. Thus, 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.
Accordingly, courts should firmly reject motions that ask the judges to call a male “she” or a female “he” in the court’s own voice. And they should never force litigants or lawyers to repeat words that contradict biological sex.
To be clear, no litigant should be mocked. Indeed, the Court itself in B.P.J. said that 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.
In closing, courts exist to say what the law is. That duty begins with saying what is true.
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