Let’s be honest. The question of whether transgender athletes have a right to play school-sponsored sports was always the toughest legal issue facing trans advocates.

The Supreme Court’s trans rights precedents are particularly ill-suited for plaintiffs challenging state laws prohibiting trans women from playing on women’s sports teams. The politics of this issue are absolutely awful for trans people. And the Court is dominated by Republicans who, just last June, voted that states could ban trans youth from receiving gender-affirming medical care.

So it is likely that most of the justices will rule, in either Little v. Hecox or West Virginia v. B.P.J., that states may prohibit trans women from playing women’s sports at the high school or college level. Both cases present this question to the justices — although there is a chance the Court will dismiss the Hecox case because the plaintiff in that case makes a strong argument that the case is now moot.

Key takeaways

• The question of whether trans women may play high school or college sports has always been the most difficult legal issue facing trans rights advocates.
• In Bostock v. Clayton County, the Supreme Court said a law banning “sex” discrimination in employment protects trans workers.
• But sex discrimination is allowed in sports — teams are typically gender-segregated — so Bostock doesn’t apply there.

To understand why trans advocates must climb such a steep hill to prevail in Hecox or B.P.J., it’s helpful to be familiar with Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), the one major victory the Court has given transgender Americans. Bostock held that a federal law which bars employment discrimination “on the basis of sex” prevents workplace discrimination targeting LGBTQ employees.

Although Bostock assumed that the word “sex” refers only to “biological distinctions between male and female” (that is, to sex assigned at birth), it concluded that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”

The idea is that if Herman is allowed to date Janet, but Juanita is not, then Juanita is being treated differently because of her sex. Similarly, if a cisgender male worker is allowed to wear stereotypically male clothes, to use a male name, and to otherwise present as a man, then an “employee who was identified as female at birth” must also be allowed to do so, or they are also being discriminated against because of their sex.

But this rationale does not apply to sports, because the law permits sex-segregated sports teams. If a company attempted to divide its workers into male and female “teams,” that would be illegal. But schools may, and typically do, have separate sports teams for men and women.

To prevail in a case like Hecox or B.P.J., in other words, trans plaintiffs must show that they are protected from discrimination because they are transgender — and not just because they are men or women. And, while the Supreme Court held half-a-century ago that ordinary sex discrimination by the government is typically forbidden by the Constitution, it has never ruled that transgender Americans are protected because they are trans.

Meanwhile, several sitting justices appear to have already concluded that trans people do not enjoy constitutional protection. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote an entire concurring opinion in United States v. Skremetti (2025), the trans health care case, arguing that they do not. In an even more ominous sign for trans athletes, Justice Brett Kavanaugh worried during the Skremetti oral argument that, if trans women were given heightened constitutional protection, that could enable them “to play........

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