WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday kept in place state laws banning transgender athletes from participating on women’s and girls’ sports teams.
The decision stems from challenges to bans in Idaho and West Virginia and marks a major setback for transgender rights across the country. The opinion also came as President Donald Trump’s administration has pursued a broad anti-trans agenda that has extended beyond athletics.
The nation’s highest court found, 6-3, that the bans in Idaho and West Virginia do not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment — a key question in both cases before the court.
The court was unanimous that Title IX, a landmark 1972 law that mandated sports teams be equally provided to male and female students, does not block bans like the ones in Idaho and West Virginia.
The majority opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, rejected the argument from Becky Pepper-Jackson, the transgender West Virginia girl in the case, that excluding trans girls from boys’ teams ran afoul of a 1974 amendment to Title IX that schools set “reasonable” provisions about sports participation.
West Virginia’s law — similar to those imposed by 27 other states, the International Olympic Committee, the NCAA and other sports bodies — was at least reasonable, Kavanaugh said.
“Whether biological males may participate on women’s and girls’ sports teams may be a debated policy question,” he wrote. “But the legal question for Title IX purposes is whether West Virginia may limit women’s and girls’ sports teams to biological females. As a matter of text and history, West Virginia may do so.”
Liberals would impose more scrutiny
The court’s three liberal justices agreed that Title IX did not prevent laws such as West Virginia’s and Idaho’s.
But they disagreed on the equal protection issue, and would have remanded the case back to the West Virginia federal trial court for further fact-finding.
“In not taking this modest step, the majority badly errs in two ways,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
There is an “unresolved factual dispute” about if transgender and cisgender girls “are similarly situated,” Sotomayor said. And the majority invoked “scientific uncertainty” to give too much deference to West Virginia. Both matters could have been resolved at lower courts, Sotomayor wrote.
“None of this is to suggest what the eventual outcome of this litigation would have been, or even should have been, had the majority allowed the courts below to make the missing factual determinations and had those courts correctly applied heightened scrutiny with the benefit of those facts,” she said. “The point, rather, is that this Court’s equal protection precedents require a very different approach.”
Idaho law
The Idaho case contested the Gem State’s 2020 law categorically banning trans athletes from competing on women’s and girls’ sports teams.
Lindsay Hecox sued over the ban in 2020, just months before the law — the first of its kind in the nation — was set to take effect.
Hecox wanted to try out for the women’s track and cross-country teams at Boise State University, but the Idaho law would have prevented her from doing so because she is transgender.
An Idaho federal court halted the law from taking effect later in 2020. A federal appeals court upheld the ruling in 2023 but later adjusted its scope in 2024 to only apply to Hecox, not other athletes.
In July 2024, Idaho appealed to the Supreme Court.
Hecox later asked both an Idaho federal court and the Supreme Court to drop the case.
Though a federal judge in Idaho rejected that attempt in October, the Supreme Court deferred the request until after oral arguments were heard back in January.
Idaho Republicans cheer
Several of Idaho’s leading elected officials, all Republicans, issued statements praising Tuesday’s ruling.
Gov. Brad Little noted in an emailed statement that the Idaho law was the first of its kind at the state level.
“We are leading the nation in supporting generations of women and men who fought hard to uphold Title IX protections and keep girls and women safe,” he said. “I want to thank the Idaho Legislature and Representative Barbara Ehardt in particular for her leadership on this issue of great importance to female athletes across Idaho and the nation. This is a historic moment for common sense!”
Ehardt,who sponsored Idaho’s ban in the state Legislature called the decision the end of an “amazing journey.”
“I said from the very beginning that it would end up at the Supreme Court, and when it did, I was privileged enough to sit in that courtroom and listen,” Ehardt said. “I expected my legislation, and thus Title IX, to be upheld as it should be. Opportunities for girls and women should never be confused with male feelings!”
West Virginia law
The case in West Virginia surrounded a 2021 Mountain State law that also bans trans athletes from participating on women’s and girls’ sports teams.
Pepper-Jackson wanted to try out for the girls’ cross-country team when starting middle school, but would have been prevented from doing so under the state law because she is transgender.
In 2021, Pepper-Jackson’s mother sued on her behalf.
A federal appeals court in 2024 barred the state from enforcing the ban, which prompted West Virginia to ask the Supreme Court to weigh in.
Trump’s anti-trans agenda
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has sought at the federal level to prohibit trans athletes’ participation in women’s sports teams aligning with their gender identity, including through an executive order Trump signed last year.
That executive order made it the policy of the United States to “rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy.”
The NCAA promptly changed its policy to comply with the order, limiting “competition in women’s sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth only.”
Trump has signed other executive orders targeting trans people, including orders that make it the “policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” restrict access to gender-affirming care for kids and aim to bar openly transgender service members from the U.S. military.
