The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has upheld state laws barring transgender girls and women from competing on school sports teams, delivering another significant legal setback for transgender Americans. In a decision issued Tuesday, the court ruled 6-3 that bans in Idaho and West Virginia do not violate the Constitution. In a unanimous vote, all nine justices agreed the bans also do not violate Title IX — the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education.
“States may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court. More than two dozen other Republican-led states have enacted similar bans, and Tuesday’s ruling is expected to apply to them as well.
The decision does not resolve pending lawsuits in Connecticut, California, and other states that permit transgender athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity. Those cases remain active.
The Two Athletes at the Centre of the Cases
The Idaho case centred on Lindsay Hecox, who sued over the state’s first-in-the-nation ban for the opportunity to try out for women’s track and cross-country teams at Boise State University. Her lawyers argued the case had become moot because she did not make either squad and had forsworn attempting to compete on women’s teams — a position the court did not accept as grounds for dismissal.
In West Virginia, Becky Pepper-Jackson — a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Bridgeport who has publicly identified as a girl since age 8, has been on puberty-blocking medication, and holds a West Virginia birth certificate recognising her as female — became the case’s most visible figure. Pepper-Jackson had progressed from a back-of-the-pack cross-country runner in middle school to statewide champion in the shot put, winning her most recent state championship by two feet. Her lawyers argued that her early transition meant she holds none of the physiological advantages the bans are designed to address — an argument the majority rejected.
A Court That Has Consistently Ruled Against Transgender Rights
Tuesday’s ruling continues a pattern. In 2025, the court’s six conservative justices upheld state bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors. In 2020 — in a different ideological moment — the court ruled that LGBTQ people are protected from sex discrimination in the workplace, finding that “sex plays an unmistakable role” in employment decisions targeting transgender people. The states supporting the athletic bans argued there was no reason to extend that workplace protection to the sports context, a position the court accepted Tuesday.
Idaho’s solicitor general told the court during arguments that its law is “necessary for fair competition because, where sports are concerned, men and women are obviously not the same.” The lawyer for Pepper-Jackson countered that such generalisations apply specifically to her client’s unique circumstances — a position the court rejected.
The issue carries outsize political and cultural weight relative to the actual numbers involved. NCAA president Charlie Baker told Congress in 2024 that he was aware of only 10 transgender athletes out of more than half a million college athletes. After President Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring transgender women from women’s sports, both the NCAA and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committees adopted bans. An AP-NORC poll from October 2025 found approximately six in ten US adults favoured limiting transgender youth to sports teams matching the sex they were assigned at birth, with roughly two in ten opposed.
Approximately 724,000 people aged 13 to 17 — around 3.3% of that age group — identify as transgender in the United States, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.
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