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Rep. Nancy Mace, RS.C., called out American Civil Liberties Union attorney Joshua Block for refusing to define sex after arguing against considering its definition during a Supreme Court hearing on trans athletes in women’s sports.
Block, who represents transgender athlete Becky Pepper-Jackson of West Virginia, urged the nine justices not to consider the definition of sex when deciding Pepper-Jackson’s case, saying, “I don’t think the purpose of Title IX is to have a precise definition of sex.
Block later admitted, “I think in this case you can accept, for the sake of this case, that we’re talking about what they’ve termed biological sex.”
The lawyer then refused to give his definition of sex after the hearing when asked by Pakinomist Digital, fleeing further questioning.
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Joshua Block, senior counsel with the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Projects and lead attorney representing Becky Pepper-Jackson, outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, DC, U.S., Tuesday, January 13, 2026. (Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Mace re-shared footage of Block dodging the question on X, condemning the ACLU for refusing to define ‘sex’.
“If the ACLU can’t even define what sex is, they have no credibility lecturing anyone about sexism, which is the entire basis of their argument,” Mace wrote.
John Bursch of Alliance Defending Freedom, the law firm representing female athletes and the state of West Virginia, said Block’s insistence on not defining sex was “absolutely bizarre.”
“It’s completely bizarre. I don’t know how you can decide a case that interprets sex under Title IX and under the Equal Protection Clause by not defining sex,” Bursch told Pakinomist Digital after the hearing.
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“Sex, when Title IX was enacted, meant biological sex, the entire statute was written with biological distinctions, it even refers to each of the sexes. I don’t know how the court can do that, and it says a lot that he felt, and the ACLU felt, that they had to tell the court not to define sex in order for them to survive this case.”
Earlier in the hearing, Block minimized the impact of Pepper-Jackson’s presence on a girls cross country team on other girls, arguing that cross country is a sport that has no cuts. Judge Neal Gorsuch responded by bringing up that many sports have cutbacks, and those sports are also affected by the ruling in this case.
Block responded by arguing that plenty of female athletes don’t make their teams due to being outsold by other female athletes, then admitted that if a female athlete is supplanted by a trans athlete, it’s “unfortunate.”
“Nobody likes to lose, nobody likes not being on the team. People often don’t make the team, cisgender girls don’t make the team when they’re competing against other cisgender girls all the time, and I think the question I think is if it’s an unfair advantage because a transgender girl made it,” Block said. “And if there’s no sex-based biological distinction there, then I think that’s an unfortunate situation, but I think that’s the unfortunate situation that comes with having a zero-sum game, not with inherent unfairness.”
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At one point, Block argued, “There is a group of people who are assigned male at birth for whom it is harmful to be placed on the boy’s team,” referring to trans athletes like Pepper-Jackson.
