Courts interpret legislation. They do not determine who a person is. When the US Supreme Court ruled on transgender girls in school sports, it issued a legal judgment, not a verdict on identity. Marie Willa Bobo-Smith, a transgender woman and advocate from Fort Bragg, said it plainly: no ruling changes the fact that she is a woman, and no ruling changes that the girls affected are girls.

What Marie actually said

Marie's piece in the Press Democrat is one of the clearest, most grounded things I have read in this debate in a long time. She is a woman who has spent more than 60 years living with the consequences of other people deciding they knew her better than she knew herself. She survived being told to suppress, to conform, to disappear. And now, from that hard-won place, she writes with the kind of precision that only comes from having thought something through completely.

She is not angry in a performative way. She is something more formidable than that. She is calm and exact. "There are girls," she writes. "There are women. Some of us happen to be transgender." Not a separate category. Not a subcategory. An adjective that describes one aspect of a life, nothing more.

She spent more than 25 years as a network technical specialist working on mission-critical systems. She knows what it means to follow evidence rather than defend a conclusion already reached. And that engineering discipline is threaded through everything she writes: if your conclusion comes before your investigation, you are no longer following evidence. You are defending an assumption. That is the sentence I want printed on a wall somewhere in every legislature currently passing these bans.

What the ruling did, and what it did not do

The Supreme Court issued a legal ruling on a specific question about school sports eligibility. What it did not do is answer the moral question. It did not determine whether trans girls are girls. It did not vote on whether trans women are women. It issued an interpretation of law in a particular context, as courts do.

I have watched the same move play out in the UK, where the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 was immediately treated by some as a general declaration about trans women's place in society. It was not. Courts interpret statutes. Parliament makes law. And neither courts nor parliaments get to decide the inner life of a human being.

The girls affected by the US ruling are girls. They wake up in the morning as girls. They go to school as girls. They want to run cross country, swim, play volleyball, join the softball team, for exactly the same reasons every other girl does: teamwork, friendship, the ordinary joy of belonging somewhere. A court ruling does not reach into that and change it.

The science is not where the bans say it is

Marie makes a careful point about the evidence, and I think she is right. Supporters of these bans say the science is settled. It is not. The research on transgender athletes and competitive performance is genuinely complex and still developing. Scientists agree that puberty affects athletic performance and that hormone therapy changes physiology in significant ways. What they do not agree on is that the available evidence justifies blanket exclusions across every sport, every age group, and every level of competition. Much of the published literature describes the evidence base as limited and evolving.

The number of transgender students actually participating in school athletics is extraordinarily small. The legislative response has been wildly disproportionate to any demonstrated problem. That disproportion is not an accident. It reflects the fact that this was never really about competitive fairness. It was about something Marie names directly: who society is willing to recognise as fully human.

History tends to remember these moments clearly

Marie writes that history is filled with moments when courts gave legal approval to exclusion, believing they were preserving order or protecting society. We remember those decisions not because they reflected our highest ideals, but because they revealed how easily fear can be mistaken for justice.

I believe she is right about that too. The argument that trans women must be excluded in order to protect women frames trans women and other women as opposing groups with incompatible interests. I reject that framing entirely. Trans women are women. Supporting women's sport does not require deciding that some women are not women. Those are not contradictory positions, as Marie says; they are entirely compatible, and the suggestion that they are not is the real distortion at the heart of this debate.

What I want every trans person reading this to hold onto

Courts, legislatures, referenda, op-eds, radio phone-ins: none of them have the power to reach inside you and change who you are. Marie has lived that truth for more than 60 years, through eras far more hostile than this one, and she is still here, still writing with precision and warmth, still saying clearly: I am a woman.

The girls who want to run cross country with their classmates are girls. The women who want to swim with their club are women. No vote changes that. No ruling changes that. And no amount of noise in the political atmosphere changes the simple, human reality of a person who knows who they are.

Marie ends her piece with something I want to leave you with too. Justice is not measured by how we treat those who fit comfortably within society's expectations. Justice is measured by how we treat those whom society finds easiest to exclude.

That is the measure. And by that measure, we have some way still to go.