Supreme Court upholds state bans on transgender girls in girls' sports
The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state bans on transgender girls from participating in girls' and women's competitive sports, reversing a pair of lower court decisions that had blocked the bans as violations of Title IX and the 14th Amendment.
The 6-3 decision came from Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The ruling in a pair of cases from West Virginia and Idaho effectively upholds laws in those two states, plus 27 others that block trans girls from teams consistent with their gender identity.
The decision marks the first time the high court has weighed in on the heated national debate over transgender athletes.
The court's ruling is a major setback for the estimated 122,000 transgender American teenagers who participate in high school sports, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA.
For trans teens and their families, the dispute has involved a matter of immutable identity and equal opportunity.
For many states and top U.S. athletic organizations, including the U.S. Olympic Committee and NCAA, the inclusion of trans athletes has been seen as creating an unfair and unsafe playing field.
The competitive advantage boys and men have physically over girls and women has been well established in physically demanding sports by medical research and serves as a primary basis for distinctions between the sexes in athletics.
Studies have shown testosterone produced during male puberty does lead to more muscle mass, larger hearts and lungs, greater body height and longer limbs on average for boys and men, according to the American College of Sports Medicine.
Many transgender teens who have received gender-affirming medical treatment from a young age argue that they lack any physiological advantage because they have not undergone male puberty.
Twenty-one states allow transgender girls to compete on girls' sports teams, including California and New York, which have laws explicitly protecting the right of trans girls to play.
Becky Pepper Jackson, the only known openly transgender athlete in West Virginia in any sport, sued her state in a bid to continue competing on her high school track team where she throws discus and shot put. Jackson recently won the state championship in girls shot put.
"I've been a girl forever, and playing on the guys' team is going backwards," she told ABC News in an interview last year.
When West Virginia's law takes effect, she will no longer be allowed to participate in girls competitive sports leagues. Competing with boys, she said, would "go against who I am."
Becky, who has openly identified as a girl since third grade, said she has never undergone male puberty, thanks to puberty-blocking medication.
Idaho college student Lindsay Hecox, a former track and cross-country runner who was barred from trying out for her school teams, sued over her state's ban in 2020. Last year, she asked the Supreme Court to drop her case because she no longer wished to compete in sports and didn't want to be in the spotlight. However, Idaho fought to keep the case alive.
Lower courts concluded separately that the state bans discriminate "on the basis of sex" in violation of Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that has promoted equal opportunities for women and girls in athletics, and the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause.
The Supreme Court's conservative majority reversed those decisions and reinstated the laws.
Last year, the same majority upheld a Tennessee law banning some gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender minors, rejecting claims that the law discriminated "on the basis of sex" and saying that states should have leeway to regulate health care in an area of scientific uncertainty.
In 2020, however, the high court concluded in a landmark decision that a Michigan transgender woman fired by her employer for being transgender was discriminated against "on the basis of sex" under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Justice Neil Gorsuch explained in his majority opinion at the time that her termination was "for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex."
Sixty-nine percent of Americans believe transgender girls should only be allowed to play on boys' teams, consistent with their gender assigned at birth, according to a June 2025 Gallup survey.
