Supreme Court Seems Ready to Ban Trans Kids From Playing Sports |
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared poised Tuesday to allow states to ban transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams.
The court heard oral arguments for two cases from Idaho and West Virginia in which lawyers for the trans teens argued that the state laws they’d challenged relied on broad generalization about the sexes, and their supposed biological advantages, that did not apply to their specific clients, The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, solicitor generals from these states insisted that biological sex matters in sports because of supposed competitive advantages.
The first case was from Idaho, involving college senior Lindsay Hecox, who has attempted to drop her case in order to proceed through the rest of school “without the extraordinary pressures of this litigation and related public scrutiny.”
The second case involves Becky Pepper-Jackson, a West Virginia high school student. Pepper-Jackson’s lawyer, Joshua Block of the ACLU, argued that his client did not hold an unfair advantage to her teammates and opponents because she had never gone through male puberty and had been taking hormone blockers.
While the conservative justices acknowledged that there was some scientific disagreement about competitive advantages between the sexes, they still seemed inclined to agree with states. Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that Title IX did not protect transgender athletes from discrimination because it prevented discrimination based on “sex,” not gender identity.
“I hate, hate that a kid who wants to play sports might not be able to play sports. Hate that. But we have kind of a zero-sum game for a lot of teens,” he said, arguing that a transgender girl will inevitably take the spot entitled to a cisgender girl.
Of course, it’s not clear that there are that many transgender female athletes to begin with. Charlie Baker, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, reported in 2024 that of the 510,000 total college athletes, there were fewer than 10 transgender students.
Trapped in the minority, the liberal justices suggested that the plaintiffs could seek “as applied” challenges to their states laws, meaning the cases could go back through lower courts separately to demonstrate that the two girls did not possess the unfair advantages implied by their assigned sex at birth.
A woman in Minneapolis was dragged out of her car and arrested by ICE agents on Tuesday after informing agents the street they were blocking to conduct a raid was blocking her route to her doctor’s office.
The woman could be seen arguing with masked agents while they tell her to move her car up the street.
“This bitch just said he was gonna break my window if I don’t move my car!” the woman said from the driver’s seat, pointing directly at the ICE agent screaming in her face before throwing her hands up in frustration.
The ICE agents told the woman again to move along. Then one agent went to the passenger side window and broke it, while two others cut the woman’s seatbelt and dragged her out of her car.
“I’ve been beat up by police before, I’m disabled just trying to go to the doctor up there, that’s why I can’t move!” she says before being pushed against her car and arrested. Protesters scream in disgust, and whistles and car horns blare for the entirety of the clip.
“All you do is hurt!” one protester yelled at the agents, among a chorus of “Fuck you.” The woman was then placed in handcuffs.
Today at 34 & Park in Minneapolis, a woman tried to drive down the street where a protest had broken out in front of a home ICE was raiding, saying she had a doctor apt to get to. ICE agents busted out her windows, cut off her seatbelt, and pulled her out before arresting her. pic.twitter.com/Y9bDF1xfKW
“This is what living under a federal siege looks like,” Minnesota state Senator Omar Fateh wrote on X. “This isn’t about public safety—this is terrorism.”
This is just one of many awful scenes that have emerged from Minneapolis since the Department of Homeland Security responded to ICE’s killing of Renee Nicole Good by sending in even more masked, armed agents.
“I’ve been talking to people in Minneapolis, and the stories I’m hearing are traumatizing; people waking up to the smell of tear gas, wrecked cars left in the middle of roadways, businesses locked down, a state of fear,” American Immigration senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick said. “This is what Stephen Miller wants to bring to every city.”
Six Minnesota prosecutors have resigned from the Justice Department over an investigation into the widow of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week.
Among those who quit Tuesday was Joseph H. Thompson, who oversaw a Minnesota fraud investigation last year that has garnered increased attention from the Trump administration in recent weeks. According to The New York Times, Thompson, a career attorney with the DOJ, objected to senior department officials pressing for a criminal investigation into Good’s wife, Becca, as well as to the department’s decision to shut out state officials from the investigation into Good’s killing.
Thompson had sought to work with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which reviews police shootings in the........