5 takeaways from the Supreme Court’s showdown over transgender athletes...

Sotomayor honed in on mootness, arguing that if the case isn’t thrown out, they would be forcing “an unwilling plaintiff” to participate in the high-profile case. But Idaho Solicitor General Alan Hurst argued that the case should proceed, despite Sotomayor’s reference to Hecox’s court filing declaring she has permanently stopped playing sports. “Every other promise that she made in this litigation, that she was going to continue trying out, that she was going to stay in sports, held true until this case and the negative attention she received,” Hurst pushed back. To which Sotomayor responded: “Do you doubt that having a named case with such an eventful event is going to continue attention on this person?” Block, who represented Becky Pepper-Jackson in the West Virginia case, urged the high court to send that case back to the lower courts due to arguments over physiological advantages some transgender athletes may have but Pepper-Jackson may not. He stressed that Pepper-Jackson has identified as a female since the third grade, started puberty blockers and has received hormone therapy to prevent her from experiencing male puberty and the increases in muscle strength that typically go with it. “Look, if they’re right about the facts, then we should lose,” Block said about the arguments over physiological advantages. “I’m suggesting that the case be allowed to be decided on remand on the factual question,” he said. “This is an important issue. It may affect the whole country and the court wants to get it right. And I don’t think the best way to get it right is to rely on cherry-picked studies or assertions and amicus briefs.” Male-dominated chess clubs and sex differences in teen brains Lawyers for Idaho, West Virginia and the Trump administration all argued Tuesday that, at least in the context of education, athletic competition stands alone as an area where sex really makes a difference. However, several justices of different ideological stripes made clear they were far from certain that athletics were the only area where men and women perform differently. “How about chess club?” Kagan asked. West Virginia Solicitor General Michael Williams suggested “an actual lack of evidence of meaningful physiological differences” impacting chess, but Kagan wasn’t buying it. “If you look at the ranks of chess Grand Masters, there are not a whole lot of women there,” she said. “There are a lot of chess Grand Masters who would tell you that women just like, for whatever reason … they’re not as good at this.” Williams called chess “an interestingly closer question” and added he’d “come to understand just recently, in fact, that there are sex distinctions” in the elite ranks. Justice Neil Gorsuch broadened the question, hypothesizing “a lot of evidence that girls perform a lot better in high school than boys.” Mooppan dismissed that as “pseudo-science,” prompting Kagan to jump in and disagree. “It’s not pseudo-science,” she insisted. “Boys’ brain development happens at a different stage than girls’ does.”