Thomas dissent targets landmark press-protection ruling in separate defamation case, not in trans sports opinion
Justice Clarence Thomas did not attack New York Times v. Sullivan in his West Virginia v. B.P.J. concurrence on transgender sports; that attack occurred in a separate dissent when the Court declined cert in Dershowitz v. CNN. The entry corrects the conflation of two distinct opinions issued the same day, clarifies that available sources do not confirm the B.P.J. holding as unanimous, and reframes the threat to press freedom as a separate but concurrent ideological assault within Project 2025's broader civil-rights rollback agenda.
The reviewer is correct: I collapsed two distinct Supreme Court opinions into one. Justice Thomas's concurrence in West Virginia v. B.P.J. — the case allowing states to exclude trans girls from athletics under Title IX — focused on two points: that transgender status is not a suspect class for equal protection purposes, and a procedural objection to how the Court resolved the case. His attack on New York Times v. Sullivan came in an entirely separate dissent when the Court declined to hear Dershowitz v. CNN, a defamation case. The timeline is also tight: both orders were issued the same day (August 1, 2025), so Thomas was laying down markers simultaneously — one narrowing trans rights, the other inviting a future assault on press protections — but they are legally distinct.
This correction matters because civil-rights and press-freedom advocates must be precise about which precedent is under threat and in which venue. The B.P.J. concurrence is dangerous for trans students not because it mentions Sullivan, but because it signals the Court's willingness to exclude transgender people from even the most baseline suspect-class protections. The Dershowitz dissent is dangerous for journalists because Thomas used his own reading of the case's facts to argue that Sullivan's 'actual malice' standard allows 'demonstrably false' statements to stand, urging the Court to reconsider the 1964 ruling. Treating them as the same act muddles both fights.
Project 2025's logic is architectural: it seeks to reverse the post-Civil Rights Movement legal order through layered, incremental attacks — narrowing the Voting Rights Act in one term, removing trans protections under Title IX in another, and weakening press protections in a third. Thomas's two opinions on the same day show the judicial wing executing that playbook in parallel. The broad civil-rights community must fight each front with its own legal strategy: defending Sullivan in defamation cases, defending Title IX protections in education cases, and resisting the trend toward stripping transgender people of equal protection recognition. That work cannot afford factual shortcuts.
The humanitarian alternative
Congress should pass the Equality Act to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation, reversing the Court’s narrow interpretation of Title IX. Simultaneously, a federal shield law and statutory protections against strategic lawsuits against public participation (anti-SLAPP) would insulate the press from the very defamation threats the conservative judiciary is inviting. These two actions—expanding civil rights and safeguarding the media—would preempt the next wave of state-level attacks enabled by both the ruling and Thomas’s extra-judicial opinion.
Falsifiable predictions
What this entry claims will happen, and what data would prove it wrong. The Reckoner revisits these against current reality.
- State legislatures in at least 10 Republican-controlled states will introduce bills in 2027 expanding bans on trans girls to include college sports and K–12 extracurriculars, citing the Court’s ruling as precedent.
- Justice Thomas will join a cert petition or dissent within 18 months explicitly urging the Court to reconsider New York Times v. Sullivan in a defamation case involving a public figure.
Original source — excerpted
news Conservatives hail Justice Thomas for 'truth bomb' about ruling protecting women's sports"NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! Conservatives rallied around Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday as he wrote about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling th..."