Argument next in case 2443, West Virginia versus BPJ. Mr. Williams?

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court, states have long assigned students to sports teams by sex.

West Virginia is no different. Maintaining separate boys and girls' sports teams ensures that girls can safely and fairly compete in school sports.

The question today is whether this enduring structure can continue. It can.

Title IX permits sex-separated teams. It does so because biological sex matters in athletics

in ways both obvious and undeniable. The text, history, context, and

structure of the statute, alongside regulations expressly authorizing what West Virginia has done,

confirm as much. Respondent says that West Virginia schools can no longer designate teams

by looking to biological sex.

Instead, schools must place students on sports teams based on their self-identified gender.

But that idea turns Title IX, a law Congress passed to protect educational opportunities for girls,

into a law that actually denies those opportunities for girls.

The court should not embrace that backwards logic.

Aside from its problems with Title IX, the decision below constitutionalizes one-sides

view of a hotly disputed issue.

But West Virginia's law does not offend the Equal Protection Clause either.

The West Virginia legislature reasonably

and rationally defines sex based on biology and acknowledge the physical differences that biology

creates. Given those differences, the law satisfies rational basis review. And the state's law

satisfies even intermediate scrutiny because it is substantially related to the important

governmental interest in ensuring fairness and safety in girls' sports. Respondent attacks the law

by searching for a transgender classification that simply isn't there. The law is indifferent to

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