The Supreme Court of the United States on Tuesday upheld state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams.
As reported by The Associated Press, 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 additional Republican-led states have adopted bans on female transgender athletes.
"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," Mark Sherman and Lindsay Whitehurst wrote for the AP.
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, a high school sophomore in Bridgeport, W.V.
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.
According to Sherman and Whitehurst, Pepper-Jackson 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 the entire state.
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, Sherman and Whitehurst reported. 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.
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," Sherman and Whitehurst wrote. "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.
