Banning trans athletes from women's sport has never been about fairness. The Supreme Court is now weighing two cases that will decide whether states can exclude trans girls and women from sport entirely, and the media coverage tells you as much about the politics as the law does.

Laura Ingraham devoted a segment on Fox News to the Supreme Court's deliberations in West Virginia v. BPJ and Little v. Hecox. Both cases ask whether states can pass laws barring transgender athletes from competing in women's and girls' sport, using sex assigned at birth as the deciding criterion. Ingraham frames this as a settled question of "biological sex" and Title IX. The segment mentions a transgender student's perspective, which is something at least, though how much weight that perspective is given in the actual broadcast I rather doubt.

Let me tell you what those case names represent, because behind them are real people. BPJ is a girl who wanted to run cross-country at her school in West Virginia. She was not trying to dominate a podium or strip a scholarship from anyone. She wanted to run with her classmates. The state of West Virginia passed a law specifically designed to stop her. The question the Supreme Court is now considering is whether that law is constitutional.

What "biological sex" does in this argument

The phrase "biological sex" is doing a lot of work in this coverage, and it is worth watching what it actually does. It sounds scientific. It sounds settled. It implies that the question of who competes where has a clean, biological answer that everyone agrees on, if only trans activists would stop complicating things. None of that is true.

Sex, as any endocrinologist will tell you, involves chromosomes, hormones, anatomy, and secondary characteristics, and these do not always align. Elite sport has grappled with this for decades, which is why every major sporting body from the International Olympic Committee downwards has moved away from simplistic binary testing. The IOC's framework now asks not about chromosomes but about whether a given athlete's physiology confers a competitive advantage in a specific event. That is a much harder question to answer, and it varies sport by sport, event by event, and athlete by athlete.

Fox's framing collapses all of that complexity into a slogan, and the slogan points in one direction only: out.

The argument they are not making is about discomfort

Here is what I keep noticing. When you press the actual objection to trans inclusion in sport, the scientific language falls away surprisingly quickly, and what you find underneath is discomfort. Some athletes say they feel uncomfortable competing alongside trans women. Some parents say they feel uncomfortable with their daughters sharing changing rooms. Some spectators say they feel uncomfortable with the idea of it.

I take discomfort seriously as a human experience. But discomfort is not a policy foundation, and it is certainly not a constitutional one, and the reason I say that with some confidence is that discomfort has been here before. It was the reason given for keeping women out of distance running for most of the twentieth century: officials worried that the marathon would be too physically demanding, that women's presence would change the atmosphere, that men would feel awkward. It was the reason given for resisting racial integration in American sport. It was the reason given for objecting to openly gay athletes competing. In every case, the discomfort was real. In every case, it was the wrong test.

If we accepted that one group's discomfort is sufficient reason to exclude another group from public life, we would still have segregated locker rooms in a very different sense. The feeling is not nothing. But a feeling is not a right, and someone else's feeling is not a reason to remove your right to participate.

Title IX was supposed to open doors

Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education programmes, was passed in 1972 specifically to get women into sport. It opened doors. It funded programmes. It told girls that they belonged on the field. Now it is being invoked to close a door on a much smaller group of girls, and that inversion should trouble anyone who cares about what the law was actually for.

The argument that Title IX requires the exclusion of trans women to protect cisgender women is not obviously wrong as a legal reading; that is genuinely what the Supreme Court will have to consider. But it is an argument that uses the language of inclusion to justify exclusion. It takes a law designed to expand participation and asks it to shrink the category of people who may participate. Whatever the Court decides, that is a strange thing to do with a civil rights statute.

What the coverage leaves out

The Fox segment mentions a transgender student's perspective. Good. But the framing around it, the legal arguments about "biological sex," the implication that this is a matter of protecting women, positions that perspective as a counterpoint to something reasonable rather than as the thing the law is being asked to do violence to.

BPJ wanted to run. That is the story. A child wanted to run cross-country, and a state legislature passed a law to stop her, and that law is now at the Supreme Court. The coverage that treats this as a debate about the integrity of women's sport is not covering the story. It is covering a political argument that has chosen sport as its current arena, the same argument that has also chosen bathrooms, healthcare, libraries, and schools. The arena changes. The argument is the same: trans people should not be here.

The Supreme Court's decision in these cases will matter enormously, not only for the young people at the centre of them, but for every trans child who wants to know whether the law sees them as a full person or as a problem to be managed. I hope the justices stay close to that question, because the noise around it is very loud, and some of it is coming from prime time on Fox.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.