Supreme Court Battle Over Trans Athletes Is About So Much More Than Sports |
Fifteen-year-old Becky Pepper-Jackson and her mother are suing the state of West Virginia so she may continue to compete in high school sports as a transgender girl.Scout Tufankjian/ACLU
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear a pair of cases brought by a transgender girl in West Virginia and a transgender woman in Idaho who argue they should be able to play on women’s school sports teams. On the surface, the cases invoke headline-grabbing controversies over the fairness of transgender women and girls competing against cisgender female athletes. But beneath that, they have the potential to produce sweeping consequences—either aiding or devastating trans people’s ability to fight back in court when state laws and school rules discriminate against them.
29 states have banned trans girls and women from K-12 through college from participating on women’s sports teams.
The science of trans women athletes is sparse and the subject of intense disputes. As I’ve reported before, it’s well established that their athletic performance declines after hormone therapy, but the data varies on whether this decline is enough to bring them in line with cisgender women.
A total of 29 states have nonetheless banned trans girls and women from K-12 through college from participating on women’s sports teams. Last year, in response to a Trump executive order called “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” the NCAA and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee both changed their policies to categorically exclude trans women from the women’s division.
“We all know what it feels like when you can’t participate, and we know the pain that comes from being excluded and being told that you can’t play,” said ACLU senior counsel Joshua Block, one of the lawyers on the West Virginia case, at a press conference in early January. “Bans like West Virginia’s exclude transgender kids from everything athletics has to offer.”
But the states that brought the issue to the Supreme Court argue that cisgender women are inevitably at a physical disadvantage when they compete against transgender women, and as a result lose out on opportunities. “With increasing frequency, female athletes have been sidelined from their own teams, championship competitions, and winners’ podiums,” the state of Idaho wrote in its brief. (For context, NCAA president Charlie Baker testified in 2024 that he knew of fewer than 10 in 500,000 college athletes who were transgender.)
To understand the deeper issues at stake in the two cases, West Virginia v. B.P.J and Little v. Hecox, you have to look back six years to June 2020, when the court issued a landmark decision that has so far stood as the high-water mark for transgender rights. In Bostock v. Clayton County, the court ruled 6-3 that Title VII, the federal law banning sex discrimination in workplaces, also forbid discrimination against gay and trans workers. “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” conservative justice Neil Gorsuch thundered in........