06/30/26 10:42:00
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06/30 10:40 CDT Supreme Court upholds state laws banning transgender girls and
women from school athletic teams
Supreme Court upholds state laws banning transgender girls and women from
school athletic teams
By MARK SHERMAN and LINDSAY WHITEHURST
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) --- The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state laws barring
transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams, in another
setback for transgender people.
The court's six-justice 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. The court unanimously agreed
that barring transgender girls and women also doesn't run afoul of the federal
law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court that, "states may maintain women's
and girls' sports for biological females" to address safety and competitive
fairness concerns. "The Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of
women's and girls' sports throughout America."
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.
Left unresolved by the outcome are lawsuits challenging state laws and
regulations in Connecticut, California and elsewhere that permit transgender
athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, saying from the bench that the majority
opinion was wrong to reject an equal-protection claim from 16-year-old Becky
Pepper-Jackson.
With the science still evolving, transgender students shouldn't automatically
be shut out of team sports, she said. "We just simply do not know
scientifically that transgender students pose dangers," she said, reading from
a dissent joined by her liberal colleagues.
Pepper-Jackson, a 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. She is the only transgender person who has sought to compete in girls
sports in West Virginia.
Pepper-Jackson has progressed from a back-of-the-pack cross-country runner in
middle school to statewide champion in the shot put. She beat the second-place
finisher by two feet in last month's West Virginia championship meet.
In the Idaho case, Lindsay Hecox sued over the state's first-in-the-nation ban
for the chance to try out for the women's track and cross-country teams at
Boise State University in Idaho. 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.
Prominent women in sports have weighed in on both sides. Tennis champion
Martina Navratilova, swimmers Summer Sanders and Donna de Varona and beach
volleyball player Kerri Walsh Jennings are supporting the state bans. Soccer
stars Megan Rapinoe and Becky Sauerbrunn and basketball players Sue Bird and
Breanna Stewart back the transgender athletes.
Kavanaugh, who has coached girls' basketball, underlined the importance of
women's sports and athletes' dedication. "No student-athlete on either side of
the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be
ostracized or vilified," he wrote.
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 nine-member court declined
to apply the same sort of analysis when they upheld state bans on
gender-affirming care for transgender minors.
The states supporting the 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."
Republican President Donald Trump applauded Tuesday's decision, calling it a
"BIG WIN" in a social-media post.
Lawyers for Pepper-Jackson argued that such distinctions generally make sense
but that their client has none of those advantages because of the unique
circumstances of her early transition. In Hecox's case, her lawyers wanted the
court to dismiss the case because she had forsworn trying to play on women's
teams.
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.
Baker's NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender
women from women's sports after President Donald Trump, a Republican, signed an
executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC
Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that
about 6 in 10 U.S. 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, not the gender they identify with, while
about 2 in 10 were "strongly" or "somewhat" opposed and about one-quarter did
not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people ages 13 to 17, or 3.3%,
identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the
UCLA School of Law.
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