NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito questioned a lawyer representing a biological male athlete in the case of Little versus Hecox Tuesday on the definitions of a woman and a girl.
Alito asked Kathleen R. Hartnett, who is arguing on behalf of the Idaho student in the Supreme Court case, what it meant to be “a boy or a girl or a man or a woman” when it came to equal protection. Hartnett agreed that a school can have separate teams for students “classified as boys and a category of students classified as girls.” Hartnett also agreed that we need to “understand what it means to be a boy or a girl and a man or a woman.”
CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito testifies about the Court’s budget during a hearing of the House Appropriations Committee’s Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee March 7, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“Sorry, I misunderstood your question. I think whatever the underlying text is, politics, law“We’ll have to understand how the state or government understood that term to determine if anyone was excluded,” Hartnett said. “We don’t have a definition for the court. We’re not disputing the definition here.
“What we’re saying is that in practice that means categorically excluding biological males from women’s teams and there is a subset of those biological males for whom it doesn’t make sense to do that based on the state’s own interests.”
Alito then asked, “How can a court determine whether there is sex discrimination without knowing what sex means for equal protection purposes?” »
HOUSE GOP LEADER DECLARES TRANS ATHLETES IN GIRLS’ SPORTS AS “GREATEST FORM OF BULLYING”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., addresses the crowd as protesters gather outside the Supreme Court as it hears arguments on state laws banning transgender girls and women from playing on school sports teams, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026, in Washington. (José Luis Magana/AP)
“I think here we just know, we basically know that they have identified in accordance with their own status, that Lindsay is considered male by birth sex and that she is categorically excluded from women’s teams by statute,” Hartnett responded. “So we take the definitions in the law as we find them and we don’t challenge them. We’re just trying to understand, do they create an equal protection problem?”
Alito then asked Hartnett a hypothetical question about a boy who never took puberty blockers or other medications but believed he was a girl and whether a school can say the boy can’t compete on a girls’ sports team.
Hartnett suggested that the hypothesis was not necessarily what his side was arguing.
At issue is whether laws in Idaho and West Virginia that prohibit transgender athletes who identify as women from playing on teams matching their gender identity discriminate on the basis of sex.
In the case of Little v. Hecox, a biological male who sought to compete on the Boise State University women’s track and field and cross country teams, argued that Idaho’s law, the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, violated the Equal Protection Clause by excluding transgender women.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
State lawyers defending the bans argue that separating sports based on biological sex preserves fairness and safety for female athletes and is consistent with Title IX’s definition of sex.
Follow Fox News Digital sports coverage on and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.