Supreme Court sides with GOP states on anti-trans sports ban
Kelsey Reichmann and Megan Butler
WASHINGTON (CN) — Marking a win for Republicans, the Supreme Court on Tuesday greenlit state laws banning transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports.
West Virginia and Idaho are among over two dozen states that enacted laws restricting girls’ sports teams based on genetics at birth. Two student athletes challenged the statutes under Title IX, a federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education, and the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Last term, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors but avoided weighing in on key constitutional protections like whether the law discriminated based on transgender status or gender identity.
Two athletes in the middle of a political firestorm
The two athletes at the center of the appeals are Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 15-year-old from West Virginia, and Lindsay Hecox, a college student at Boise State University.
Pepper-Jackson began to socially transition to live consistent with her female gender identity in the third grade. She started puberty blockers in 2020 and hormone replacement in 2022, preventing her from ever experiencing male puberty.
Hecox sued Idaho during her freshman year of college, hoping to make the women’s track team. Hecox didn’t make the team, but she played for BSU’s women’s club soccer team for a time.
No longer a part of either team, Hecox pushed the justices to find Idaho’s case moot because it lacked a present or future dispute. She told the court that public scrutiny from the case led her to make the difficult decision to cease playing women’s sports in any context.
The Supreme Court refused to decide whether Hecox’s case was moot until after oral arguments.
On a downward spiral
In 2023, the Supreme Court sided with Pepper-Jackson on the emergency docket, allowing her to remain on her middle school track-and-field team. But in the nearly three years since her emergency docket win, the legal and political landscapes have become more hostile to transgender rights.
President Donald Trump issued executive orders rejecting the idea that people can transition to a gender that differs from their sex assigned at birth, prohibiting federal funding of gender-affirming health care and, with the high court’s approval, banning transgender service members from the military.
The NCAA subsequently reversed 15 years of precedent allowing transgender women to compete on women’s teams after completing one calendar year of testosterone suppression treatment. In 2024, the largest college sports governing body in the country instead banned their former policy after Trump threatened to pull federal funds from schools that allowed transgender women on women’s sports teams.
Pepper-Jackson and Hecox claimed the states’ prohibitions were unconstitutional as applied to them, arguing that hormone therapy eliminated biological advantages they might have had against cisgender girls.
Similar to Tennessee’s gender-affirming care case, Pepper-Jackson and Hecox urged the court to resolve their disputes through an as-applied equal protection challenge — finding that the laws were constitutional generally but unconstitutional to the transgender girls specifically.
During oral arguments in January, lingering questions on the facts and science underlying the disputes steered some justices to suggest a narrow solution tailored to school athletics. The Javits Amendment gave athletics a carve-out to this rule, giving schools the flexibility to separate girls and boys teams to give equal opportunities to both sexes.