When the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether Idaho and West Virginia can ban males from girls’ sports, two weeks after upholding Tennessee’s ban on medicalized gender transitions for minors, the transgender track athlete who defeated Idaho at trial and appeals courts got cold feet and tried to stop SCOTUS from hearing Idaho’s part of the case.
Lindsay Hecox, who is male, decided to “cease playing women’s sports in any context covered by H.B. 500” and dismissed the suit with prejudice so it cannot be filed again, claiming that continuing the litigation through SCOTUS will threaten Hecox’s “mental health, my safety, and my ability to graduate as soon as possible.”
U.S. District Judge David Nye, whose injunction against Idaho’s law as applied to Hecox was upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, doesn’t think the ACLU-represented athlete is playing it straight.
The President Trump nominee, who saved Hecox’s challenge three years ago when the 9th Circuit questioned whether the lapsed athlete would resume competing and thus maintain legal standing to sue Idaho, interpreted Hecox’s late-breaking about-face as “somewhat manipulative to avoid Supreme Court review” and ruled it “should not be endorsed.”
Nye granted Idaho’s motion to strike Hecox’s notice of voluntary dismissal, in the latest setback for the ACLU’s quest to preempt state laws that favor sex over gender identity, through federal regulation and the federal courts, while keeping SCOTUS from hearing close cases.
Federal courts including President Biden’s nominees blocked his administration’s Title IX regulation conflating sex and gender identity as his lone term closed, leaving the first Trump administration’s sex-based Title IX regulation in place. Second-term President Trump’s executive orders against gender ideology left SCOTUS the ACLU’s last hope.
That hope was dashed in June when a 6-3 court rejected the ACLU’s argument, on behalf of transgender children’s families, that gender identity is a protected trait like sex and race in the context of Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery as treatment options for gender-confused youth.
Hellbound and Down 