ACR Project Files Amicus Brief with SCOTUS Supporting West Virginia’s Defense of Separate Sex Sports Programs

The ACR Project filed briefing at SCOTUS, supporting West Virginia’s defense of its schools’ separate boys’ and girls’ sports programs.  You can see the full brief, below.

The Courts of Appeals have split over how Bostock interacts with Title IX. The Fourth Circuit takes a position warring with Bostock‘s reasoning to apply its purported holding where it cannot fit. Previously, the Circuit wrongly read Bostock and Title IX to bar separate, sex-defined bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers. Now, the Circuit extends that mistake to read Title IX to forbid separate sex-defined sports programs.

We highlight differences between Title VII and Title IX, requiring a different result for a funding recipient’s sports programs.  We explain how the public history of Title IX demonstrates that no one in the original interpretive community understood it as the Fourth Circuit does—instead, Americans of all stripes have celebrated Title IX as the foundation for modern girls’ and women’s sports for more than half a century.

There remains a better way: federalism. Neither the Constitution, nor Congress has dictated a national approach to these questions. That allows the people of West Virginia (and Idaho) to decide how West Virginia (and Idaho) will regulate their own athletics, while letting the people of Virginia (and California) do the same.