On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments on cases that could determine whether states have the authority to preserve women’s sports for biological females.

The cases, from Idaho and West Virginia, challenge laws that restrict girls’ and women’s athletic teams to participants of the same biological sex. Transgender students argue these laws violate Title IX and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

But beneath the legal claims lies a more fundamental question: who gets to define what it means to be a woman under the law?

The Court must decide whether government is required to treat self-declared gender identity as determinative—or whether it can rely on the objective reality of biological sex.

Upholding these laws protects fairness and safety in women’s sports. More importantly, it prevents sex (and womanhood itself!) from becoming an arbitrary legal construct.

That matters.

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The difference between the illusion of power and its reality is the difference between the Ayatollah Khamenei and President Donald Trump. Trump is on the cusp of joining the very small number of American presidents who reorder the world. Khamenei is on the cusp of history’s abyss reserved for murderous fanatics.

The belief in the unlimited power of a totalitarian government to maintain itself and protect its rulers is a dangerous conceit, as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro have both discovered.

It may be that Ayatollah Khamenei is in the process of discovering the same hard reality: No government, no matter how ruthless, can endure for centuries or even decades in the face of a resentful population.

Not even the rulers of Rome at the height of the Caesars were guaranteed an endless run of power.

If either the U.S. or the Israeli’s provide the final push, the great people of Persia will re-emerge and regain their place among the great civilizations on the planet.

We wish them well.

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On paper, the regime in Iran should represent everything that Western progressives reject. Women experience brutal oppression and are treated like chattel belonging to male family members. The economy centers on the nation's military-industrial complex, with the IRGC controlling 40% or more of the nation's economic output.

Don’t forget how the mullahs treat the LGBTQ community, religious minorities, indigenous peoples, and so on.

And yet, the mainstream media waited nearly two weeks to report on the uprising in Iran. Progressive publications like The Nation, the New Republic, and Slate never mentioned it. The Golden Globes vented about Trump and ICE—but remained silent on Iran.

Why the silence? As Yascha Mounk wrote on Monday, the Left’s hatred of the Western democracy makes Iran’s theocratic tyrants their natural allies. Their silence is their expression of grief that true liberty may prevail in Tehran and vindicate Western values.

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