The Supreme Court Turns Its Sights on Trans Athletes – Mother Jones

A protester waves a trans flag at the Supreme Court before arguments in the US v. Skrmetti case in December 2024.Angelina Katsanis/Politico/AP

The US Supreme Court announced Thursday that it will hear a pair of cases in the fall involving state laws in that ban transgender girls and women from participating in girls’ and women’s school sports.

The cases originate in Idaho, which passed the country’s first trans youth sports ban in 2020, and West Virginia, which followed in 2021. In both states, transgender students represented by the ACLU filed lawsuits and succeeded in blocking the laws. Now, the states—both of which are represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-right legal group behind many of the Supreme Court’s anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion decisions—are asking the justices to reverse the lower courts and declare the bans constitutional.

The high court’s decision to review the cases comes just two weeks after its landmark 6-3 ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, in which it upheld a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors, and a week since its ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, when the same conservative supermajority sided with parents seeking to opt their children out of LGBT-inclusive lessons. In the days since then, the justices have ordered lower courts to reopen cases that had been won by transgender plaintiffs—including rulings that had prevented state-sponsored health insurance plans from excluding gender-affirming care and required a state to let trans residents change the sex marker on their birth certificates.

Now the Supreme Court will take up the constitutionality of transgender sports bans. The Idaho case, Little v. Hecox, was originally filed by Lindsay Hecox, a trans woman and first-year student at Boise State who wanted to run on the women’s cross-country team. Joining her was an anonymous cisgender girl worried about the part of the law that created a “sex dispute verification process” requiring girls and women in school sports to undergo medical exams if someone challenged their femaleness.

Meanwhile, in West Virginia v. B.P.J, 11-year-old plaintiff Becky Pepper-Jackson wanted to try out for the girls’ cross-country team. “I just want to have a chance to participate in school sports like any other girl,” she wrote in a declaration in the case. “It is frustrating and hurtful that some people want to take that chance away from me and treat me differently from everyone else just because I am transgender.”

Laws restricting trans athletes’ participation in sports have proliferated across the country over the past five years, along with laws targeting their medical care, their school bathroom use, and LGBTQ themes in school curricula. Today, lawmakers in 27 states have forbidden trans girls and women from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity, typically arguing that trans athletes have biological differences that make sports less fair and less safe for cisgender participants.

Yet an effort to pass a nationwide trans sports ban failed in Congress this year, after Democrats argued that it would require invasive and potentially abusive sex testing of girls and women in sports and pointed out how few trans athletes there really are. Among the 510,000 total NCAA athletes last year, NCAA President Charlie Baker testified that he knew of fewer than 10 who were transgender.

Opponents of trans athletes notched another major victory this week when the University of Pennsylvania, under pressure from the Trump administration announced that it would ban trans women from women’s sports teams, revoke the records of swimmer Lia Thomas, who became the first openly trans athlete to win a NCAA Division I title in 2022, and apologize to women swimmers “disadvantaged” by Thomas’ participation on the Penn women’s swim team.

In March, the Supreme Court announced it will also review laws banning anti-LGBTQ conversion therapy on kids.