Our elected representatives and their appointees need to do their duties, even when it isn’t politically expedient. That’s why the Supreme Court’s recent actions are cause for concern.

Earlier this week, the court announced that it wouldn’t review a 2019 ruling by a lower court that granted a gender-confused female high school student in Virginia the right to use male restrooms. Notably, none of the three justices appointed by President Donald Trump argued in favor of considering the appeal. Last December, the court declined to review a similar case, when parents in Oregon tried to challenge school policies allowing gender-confused students the right to use opposite-gender restrooms.

The Supreme Court’s submission on this issue is deeply troubling. Six of the nine justices are supposedly principled conservatives who should recognize the risks of normalizing gender confusion. Girls and young women across the country will have to endure humiliating privacy violations, and free speech will be at risk if public schools cannot state simple realities about biological sex. Perhaps the heightened agitation around the issue during “pride” month made the justices too wary of a backlash. If so, they are abandoning their responsibility to protect basic freedoms to appease a small group of activists who will never be appeased either way.

This dangerous trend hasn’t just taken root in Virginia. In 2016, the Obama administration tried to force public schools across the country to let boys into girls’ private spaces or risk losing funding. And when North Carolina passed a law protecting the rights of private businesses – not government – to affirm the reality of biological gender, activists pressured corporations to boycott the state, and the Obama administration sued.

The Supreme Court must protect the right to call a man a man and a woman a woman. And it needs to ensure that the wellbeing of children – including young people driven to gender confusion – is protected by not normalizing transgender ideology.

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