The US Supreme Court upheld state bans on transgender girls competing in women’s and girls’ school sports on Tuesday, ruling 6-3 that neither the Constitution nor federal education law requires states to allow it. The decision settles the immediate legal dispute. It opens several others.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion in what is one of the most politically charged rulings the Supreme Court has handed down this term. The decision upheld laws in West Virginia and Idaho that require student athletes to compete on teams matching their biological sex at birth, regardless of gender identity. The vote split along ideological lines, 6-3, with the court’s three liberal justices dissenting.
“The Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women’s and girls’ sports throughout America,” Kavanaugh wrote. He added that transgender girls and women who want to play sports deserve “respect” and should not be “ostracised or vilified.” The majority’s position was that upholding the laws did not require treating trans athletes with contempt, only that states retained the right to draw the line they had drawn.
The ruling consolidated two separate cases that had moved through the courts for years before the Supreme Court agreed to hear them together.
The first centred on Becky Pepper-Jackson, a middle school student in West Virginia who was barred by state law from trying out for the girls’ cross-country team. Her family, represented by the ACLU and Lambda Legal, argued the ban violated her rights under Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in educational programmes that receive public funding, and under the equal protection clause of the Constitution.
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The second involved Lindsey Hecox, a transgender student at Boise State University in Idaho who was blocked from trying out for the varsity women’s track team under a 2020 state ban. Hecox had initially won protections through the federal courts, including an injunction upheld by the Ninth Circuit. She later dropped out of school, returned in 2025 and decided not to pursue varsity sports. The legal challenge proceeded regardless.
Both cases had been won by the trans athletes in lower federal courts. Tuesday’s ruling reversed those outcomes.
The majority held that Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination applies to biological sex, not gender identity. The court declined to determine what standard courts should use when evaluating future claims of discrimination against transgender people outside the context of sports, a significant omission that civil rights groups noted immediately.
The ruling does not create a nationwide ban. It validates the authority of states to impose one. Twenty-seven states had already passed laws barring transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ sports before the ruling. Those laws had faced varying legal obstacles depending on which federal circuit they fell under. Tuesday’s decision clears those obstacles.
John McCuskey, West Virginia’s attorney general, called it a monumental victory for every female athlete who has ever competed or dreamed of competing on a fair playing field. Idaho’s attorney general, Raul Labrador, who had argued the case before the court, welcomed the ruling as affirming what he described as common sense and the law.
The three dissenting justices argued the majority had sanctioned discrimination against a vulnerable group of young people under the cover of protecting women’s sports. The Human Rights Campaign, which describes itself as the largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organisation in the United States, called the ruling heartbreaking. President Kelley Robinson said no child deserves to be discriminated against and that transgender student athletes were being forced to sit on the sidelines simply for who they are.
The ruling landed in a political environment that has been saturated with the issue for years. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump’s team ran attack advertisements on the subject more than 15,000 times, making it one of the most heavily advertised policy positions in the race. Democrats who opposed restrictions on trans athletes found themselves repeatedly on the defensive. Since then, the question of how to respond to trans inclusion in sport has divided the broader progressive coalition, with prominent figures including tennis great Billie Jean King in favour of inclusion and Martina Navratilova among those who have argued that biological differences create unfair competitive conditions.
The majority opinion left several questions explicitly open. Can states ban transgender children from playing sports at primary school age, when boys and girls routinely play on the same teams in any case? What about club sports and recreational leagues, as distinct from varsity competition? What about transgender adults competing in professional or open-category events?
More broadly, the court declined to rule on what level of legal protection transgender people should receive when facing discrimination outside of sport. That question has significant implications for employment, housing, healthcare and other areas where trans rights cases are moving through lower courts.
The ruling follows a decision last year in which the conservative supermajority upheld a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming medical care for minors. Since then, 25 states have enacted similar bans. Three states have barred transgender individuals from changing the sex listed on their birth certificates. The pattern is one of escalating state-level restrictions supported by a Supreme Court majority that has consistently declined to extend constitutional protections to cover gender identity in the same way they apply to biological sex.
For the young athletes at the centre of Tuesday’s cases, the legal journey has ended in the court that mattered most. Becky Pepper-Jackson cannot join her school’s girls’ team under West Virginia law. Lindsey Hecox chose not to pursue the team she originally wanted to be part of. The ruling will not change either of those specific outcomes. Its reach, though, extends well beyond two young women and two states.
