The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams. The court's conservative majority, which has repeatedly ruled against transgender Americans in the past year, ruled that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia don't violate the Constitution or Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education. More than two dozen other Republican-led states have adopted bans on female transgender athletes, and the decision seems certain to extend to them as well, reports the AP. Left unresolved are lawsuits challenging state laws and regulations in Connecticut, California, and elsewhere that permit transgender athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity.
The cases involved in the ruling:
- Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Bridgeport, West Virginia, has been taking puberty-blocking medication, has publicly identified as a girl since age 8, and has been issued a West Virginia birth certificate recognizing her as female. Pepper-Jackson has progressed from a back-of-the-pack cross-country runner in middle school to statewide champion in the shot put.
- Lindsay Hecox sued over Idaho's first-in-the-nation ban on the chance to try out for the women's track and cross-country teams at Boise State University. She didn't make either squad because "she was too slow," her lawyer, Kathleen Hartnett, told the court during arguments in January, but she competed in club-level soccer and running.
In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled LGBTQ people are protected by a landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace, finding that "sex plays an unmistakable role" in employers' decisions to punish transgender people for traits and behavior they otherwise tolerate. But last year, the six conservative justices on the court declined to apply the same sort of analysis when they upheld state bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors. The states supporting prohibitions on transgender athletes argued there is no reason to extend the ruling barring workplace discrimination to Title IX. Idaho's law, state Solicitor General Alan Hurst said, is "necessary for fair competition because, where sports are concerned, men and women are obviously not the same."
NCAA president Charlie Baker told Congress in 2024 that he was aware of only 10 transgender athletes out of more than half a million students on college teams. But despite the small numbers, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after President Trump signed an executive order barring their participation. The public generally is supportive of the limits. An AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 US adults "strongly" or "somewhat" favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to compete only on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, while about 2 in 10 were "strongly" or "somewhat" opposed.
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