Equal protection law no longer recognizes so-called “inherent differences” among the races as a justification for discrimination. The law takes a different view of sex. It continues to recognize “inherent differences” as a legitimate ground for treating men and women differently — as long as the differential treatment does not perpetuate women’s subordination or reinforce traditional sex stereotypes. This doctrine raises a host of difficult questions, most notably, what counts as an “inherent difference”? The Court confronted that question twice in its 2016 Term. In Pavan v. Smith, the Court had to decide whether Arkansas could treat same-sex couples differently from different-sex couples with respect to their children’s birth certificates. In Sessions v. Morales-Santana, the question was whether the federal government, for purposes of assigning citizenship, could treat non-marital children born abroad to mixed-nationality couples differently depending on the sex of their U.S. citizen parent. In both cases, the Court rejected the government’s ostensibly biological justification for the differential treatment. But the new and important ways in which it reasoned about biology in these cases has not received much notice. Commentators treated Pavan as an obvious and relatively unimportant extension of the Court’s famous 2015 same-sex marriage decision. Meanwhile, so much was happening in the context of immigration when Morales-Santana came down that it did not attract much attention — and what attention it did attract tended to focus on the unusual remedy the Court adopted, not its reasoning about biology. This Article argues that Pavan and Morales-Santana, especially when read together, are surprisingly transformative and consequential decisions. In the past, the Court has declined to apply heightened scrutiny to biologically-justified sex classifications in contexts involving gay people and unmarried fathers. As a result, these contexts have become repositories of specious biological justifications for discrimination; pregnancy, in particular, has been understood to justify all manner of differential treatment in these areas. In Pavan and Morales-Santana, the Court broke with this tradition by genuinely scrutinizing the state’s pregnancy-based justifications for discriminating and finding them constitutionally inadequate. In so doing, it struck a serious blow against the most formidable barrier to equal protection where gay people, unmarried parents — and pregnant women — are concerned.

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生物战：两性“内在差异”的宪法冲突

平等保护法不再承认种族之间所谓的“内在差异”是歧视的理由。法律对性有不同的看法。它继续承认“内在差异”是区别对待男性和女性的合法理由——只要区别对待不会使女性从属地位永久化或强化传统的性别刻板印象。这一学说提出了许多难题，最值得注意的是，什么才算是“内在差异”？法院在 2016 年任期内两次面对该问题。在 Pavan v. Smith 案中，法院必须决定阿肯色州是否可以在孩子的出生证明方面区别对待同性伴侣和异性伴侣。在 Sessions v. Morales-Santana 案中，问题是联邦政府是否，出于分配公民身份的目的，可以根据美国公民父母的性别对在国外出生的非婚生子女给予不同国籍的夫妇不同的对待。在这两个案例中，法院都驳回了政府表面上对差别待遇的生物学理由。但它在这些情况下对生物学进行推理的新的和重要的方式并没有受到太多关注。评论员将 Pavan 视为法院 2015 年著名的同性婚姻判决的明显且相对不重要的延伸。与此同时，莫拉莱斯-桑塔纳 (Morales-Santana) 下台时，在移民方面发生了很多事情，以至于没有引起太多关注——而它吸引的关注往往集中在法院采用的不寻常的补救措施上，而不是对生物学的推理。本文认为 Pavan 和 Morales-Santana，特别是当一起阅读时，会产生令人惊讶的变革性和重要决定。过去，法院拒绝在涉及同性恋者和未婚父亲的情况下对生物学上合理的性别分类进行更严格的审查。结果，这些环境已成为歧视的似是而非的生物学理由的宝库；怀孕尤其被认为是在这些领域采取各种不同待遇的理由。在 Pavan 和 Morales-Santana 案中，法院打破了这一传统，真正审查了该州基于怀孕的歧视理由，并认为这些理由在宪法上是不充分的。这样做，它严重打击了同性恋、未婚父母和孕妇所关心的平等保护最强大的障碍。