Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a June 30 opinion that transgender language is a “lie to the public,” concurring with a ruling that blocks athletes assigned male at birth from competing against biological women.
Thomas stated, “Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are.” He described sex as an immutable biological characteristic that is binary, with terms like “man” and “woman,” “boy” and “girl” corresponding to adults and children of each sex.
The justice criticized the use of language that obscures this reality, saying it shows “indifference regarding the truth” and amounts to lying to the public, which undermines equal treatment of citizens.
Referencing the clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria—which describes psychological distress from incongruence between gender identity and sex assigned at birth—Thomas argued that gender dysphoria “does not resemble the immutable characteristics on the basis of which our precedents have applied heightened scrutiny—race, sex, or national origin.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented in part, contending that state laws banning transgender girls from women’s sports discriminate based on sex without sufficient justification and violate the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. Sotomayor wrote that the ruling “inflicts a hardship on those it disfavors without giving them the fair and full opportunity the Constitution requires to litigate their contentions.”
The American Psychiatric Association notes that not all transgender or nonbinary individuals experience gender dysphoria; it occurs only when the incongruence causes significant distress or impairment.
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