A gender-confused boy who is at the center of a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court in which West Virginia aims to ban biological males from female sports placed first in a state track and field competition last week.
“Becky” Pepper-Jackson placed first in the girls’ shot put and fourth in the girls’ discus in Class AAA at the West Virginia Secondary School Activities Commission’s (WVSSAC) state track and field championships.
Pepper-Jackson outthrew his nearest female shot put competitor by more than two feet, with the winning throw measuring 38 feet, 11.75 inches compared with the runner-up’s 36-11.
Although ACLU attorneys presented oral arguments to the Supreme Court in January, no decisions are expected until June, allowing Pepper-Jackson to continue to compete in girls high school sports.
The boy’s success perhaps comes at an inopportune time for his ACLU attorneys representing the cause of transgender athletes before the high court.
“Pepper-Jackson has now earned state champion status in dominant fashion, after the athlete’s own lawyers at the ACLU argued that males don’t have a competitive advantage over females, with ACLU attorney Joshua Block arguing ‘if the evidence shows there are no relevant physiological differences between B.P.J. and other girls, then there’s no basis to exclude her,’” Fox News’ Jackson Thompson noted.
News of the boy’s win in the female student competition prompted West Virginia Attorney General John McCuskey to fire off a letter to the Supreme Court.
“As a high school sophomore, B.P.J. is not finishing ‘near the back of the pack …’ but is instead defeating every — or nearly every — female in the state in these events. I would appreciate it if you could circulate this message to the members of the court,” McCuskey wrote.
“The developments from the state meet from this past weekend just underscore the fact that no amount of testosterone suppression or intervention can undo the very real differences that males have over women,” Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Suzanne Beecher told Fox News Digital. “It really cuts against the ACLU’s argument.”
“What has already happened by putting West Virginia’s law on hold as it applies to West Virginia in the B.P.J case is that girls have already been harmed,” Beecher said. “When you ignore differences between boys and girls, and between males and females, a lot of the harm falls on girls.”
West Virginia’s “Save Women’s Sports Act” went into effect in 2021, preventing boys from participating in girls’ sports. Pepper-Jackson’s mother then sued to allow her son to continue to compete against girls.
Mandatory inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is promoted as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities as well as undermining female players’ basic safety and privacy rights by forcing them to share showers and changing areas with members of the opposite sex.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men (do) not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy;” therefore, “the advantage to transwomen (biological men) afforded by the (International Olympic Committee) guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
The U.S. Supreme Court’s Bostock decision, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, complicated the legal terrain on the issue in 2020 by ruling that “sex discrimination” in the Civil Rights Act should be interpreted to mean sexual orientation and gender identity in addition to its original biological meaning.
Such reasoning flies in the face of both the plain statutory meaning of “sex” in 1964 and the clear legislative intent of the lawmakers who drafted and passed the Civil Rights Act, ADF senior counsel John Bursch argues. “There is little dispute that, in 1964, the term ‘sex’ was publicly understood, as it is now, to mean biological sex: male and female. After all, the term ‘gender identity’ wasn’t even part of the American lexicon at the time,” he said. “Its first use was at a European medical conference in 1963. And no semblance of it appeared in federal law until 1990.”