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Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., called out American Civil Liberties Union attorney Joshua Block for refusing to define sex after objecting to 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 ruling on the Pepper-Jackson case, and said, “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 called biological sex.”
The attorney then refused to give his definition of gender after the hearing when asked by PK Press Club Digital, and fled further questioning.
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Joshua Block, lead attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Projects and lead attorney representing Becky Pepper-Jackson, before the United States Supreme Court in Washington, DC, Tuesday, January 13, 2026. (Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Mace shared footage of Block dodging the question about X, condemning the ACLU for refusing to define “sex.”
“If the ACLU can’t even define what sex is, it has no credibility lecturing anyone about sex discrimination, which is the very basis of its 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 gender was “completely bizarre.”
“It’s completely bizarre. I don’t know how you can decide a case interpreting sex under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause by not defining sex,” Bursch told PK Press Club Digital after the hearing.
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“Sex, when Title IX was passed, 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 about what they were thinking and the ACLU felt that they had to tell the court not to define sex for them to survive this case.”
Earlier in the hearing, Block downplayed 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. Justice Neal Gorsuch responded by pointing out that many sports are undergoing cuts and that those sports are also affected by the decision in this case.
Block responded by saying that many female athletes fail to make their team due to being outperformed by other female athletes, then admitted that if a female athlete is supplanted by a trans athlete, it’s “unfortunate.”
“Nobody likes to lose, no one likes to not be on the team. A lot of times people 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 is whether it’s an unfair advantage because a transgender girl participated,” Block said.
“And if there’s no biological distinction based on sex, then I think that’s an unfortunate situation, but I think it’s the unfortunate situation that comes from a zero-sum game, not from inherent injustice.”
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At one point, Block argued, “There is a group of people who are assigned male at birth, for whom being placed on the boys’ team is detrimental,” referring to trans athletes like Pepper-Jackson.
