The Supreme Court’s trans sports ruling is about more than athletics

People think they know that men are stronger than women. But what is strength? One of us might see our mother as the strongest person we know because strength is not measured solely by muscle and arm length. It can be fortitude. The entire premise of sex differences rests on the fundamental distinction between male and female participants. It is an assumption that may fall apart under closer analysis. In sport, average men and women do not compete; individuals do — unless, of course, they are transgender.Fundamentally, sports are about winning and losing. And while nobody likes losing, there are good losses where participants learn how to improve. But there are also bad losses that leave people demoralized, broken, and without a viable path forward.On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt the transgender community a bad loss. While the Court upheld state laws blocking transgender people from playing sports in alignment with their gender identity, the decision went far beyond that. News media largely ignored this fact, but that is where the bad loss should not be ignored.The way the Court waved away equal protection claims for the transgender community and blocked many as-applied challenges to particular applications of a law will have devastating effects on the lives of transgender individuals. Functionally, the Court rubber-stamped state policies designed to erase transgender people, provided a state can justify the policy as a sex-based classification. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in dissent, almost any policy involving a remotely defensible sex classification can now require transgender people to live according to their sex assigned at birth.Related: States can ban transgender women and girls from sports, according to U.S. Supreme CourtIn effect, the Court has opened the door for states to issue "trans bans" anywhere sex-based classifications exist. Justice Neil Gorsuch noted in his concurrence that sex-differentiated dress codes are not covered by the log