US Supreme Court Upholds Ban on Transgender Athletes in Girls’ Sports
The ruling, covering two closely watched cases, Little v. Hecox out of Idaho and West Virginia v. B.P.J. , settles a legal battle that had divided lower courts and ignited fierce debate across the country’s culture wars.
In a landmark decision handed down Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a decisive blow to transgender athletes nationwide, ruling 6-3 that states have the constitutional authority to bar transgender women and girls from competing on female school and college sports teams.
The ruling, covering two closely watched cases, Little v. Hecox out of Idaho and West Virginia v. B.P.J. , settles a legal battle that had divided lower courts and ignited fierce debate across the country’s culture wars.
Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh held that West Virginia’s law did not run afoul of the Constitution’s equal protection guarantees by basing female sports eligibility on biological sex rather than gender identity.
How We Got Here
Both Idaho and West Virginia had passed laws restricting girls’ and women’s sports teams to athletes assigned female at birth. Transgender students challenged the laws, and lower appellate courts initially sided with them: the 9th Circuit blocked enforcement against Idaho’s Lindsay Hecox, while the 4th Circuit ruled West Virginia’s law violated Title IX as applied to Becky Pepper-Jackson, a teenage cross-country and track athlete.
The states pushed the Supreme Court to follow the logic of last year’s United States v. Skrmetti decision, which upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors. Lawyers for the transgender athletes countered that blanket bans ignored individual circumstances including hormone therapy and demonstrated athletic performance and unfairly targeted students based solely on their transgender status.
Part of a Bigger Pattern
Tuesday’s decision extends a string of rulings this term in which the Court’s conservative majority has sided against transgender rights claims, including decisions allowing the Trump administration to bar transgender individuals from military service and restrict gender markers on U.S. passports.
That said, the Court’s posture hasn’t been uniformly one-directional historically — in 2020 it surprised many by ruling that Title VII workplace protections extend to transgender employees.
What’s Next
With roughly two dozen other states enforcing similar bans, Tuesday’s ruling is expected to reverberate well beyond Idaho and West Virginia, effectively cementing the legal foundation for sex-based eligibility rules in school sports nationwide and almost certainly fueling the next round of political and legal fights over transgender rights in America.
