This story originally appeared on The Advocate.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state bans on transgender girls and women competing in girls’ and women’s school sports, delivering a major victory to Republican-led states and a devastating defeat to trans students who had asked the justices to let them participate in public school life as themselves.
In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court ruled that Idaho and West Virginia’s laws do not violate the Equal Protection Clause or Title IX. The cases, Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., centered on two transgender students: Lindsay Hecox, who sought to run track and cross country at Boise State University, and Becky Pepper-Jackson, a West Virginia girl who wanted to compete on girls’ teams at school.
Related: Supreme Court seems likely to rule against transgender athletes in school sports programs
For years, conservative lawmakers have positioned transgender girls’ participation in sports as an emergency, even as the number of students affected remains small. But the legal campaign was never only about who gets to run a race or join a team. It was about whether transgender people can be carved out of public life by category.
The majority rejected arguments that the laws discriminate against transgender students, relying on the court’s recent decision in United States v. Skrmetti to say the bans classify students by sex, not by gender identity or transgender status. Writing for the majority, Kavanaugh said the court would not require states or schools to make athlete-by-athlete determinations about whether a transgender girl who has taken puberty blockers or hormones has retained any athletic advantage.
“Particularly in the sports context, determining the effects of the puberty blockers and hormones taken by transgender athletes — and then comparing each of those transgender athletes’ abilities to those of other individual biological males and individual biological females in the relevant sport — would be an almost impossible task for a judge to perform on an equitable basis,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Kavanaugh said Title IX allows schools to maintain separate girls’ and boys’ sports teams based on what the court called “biological sex,” and that states may use the same rule under the Constitution. “Schools may determine eligibility for women’s and girls’ sports based on biological sex,” he wrote.
Kavanaugh was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. Thomas and Gorsuch each wrote concurring opinions.
"Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are," Thomas wrote.
In a blistering partial dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that the court had cut off the students’ constitutional claims before lower courts could resolve key factual questions.
Sotomayor agreed that Pepper-Jackson’s Title IX claim failed, but said the majority went much further than it needed to. The central fight in her dissent was over Equal Protection. She wrote that West Virginia used a sex-based classification and therefore had to satisfy heightened scrutiny. Pepper-Jackson, she said, should have had the chance to prove that the state’s stated interests in safety and fairness did not apply to transgender girls like her who had not experienced endogenous male puberty and who receive gender-affirming treatment.
“Today the Court holds that neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause protects B.P.J.’s ability to do so,” Sotomayor wrote.
She accused the majority of applying “a form of heightened scrutiny divorced from this Court’s cases” and said it had denied Pepper-Jackson the chance to test West Virginia’s claims in court.
“Yet in an opinion unencumbered by fact or law, the majority today cuts off that process prematurely, deciding instead that B.P.J.’s case must end now,” Sotomayor wrote.
The dissent framed the ruling as a constitutional retreat from treating people as individuals. Sotomayor wrote that “unjustified sex-based discrimination inflicts ‘injury ... to personal dignity’ regardless of the number of individuals affected.”
She closed by warning that the majority’s decision allows states to exclude transgender girls even where the facts may not support the state’s stated rationale.
“Because of the Court’s decision today, West Virginia, and any other state actor, can deny B.P.J. and others like her these experiences simply because it thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not,” Sotomayor wrote. “Sports, of course, are often zero sum, but the law need not and should not be.”
Jackson also wrote separately, warning that the majority went too far in declaring that Title IX’s reference to sex “cannot plausibly” mean anything beyond sex assigned at birth. “Title IX makes room for individuals to live in the gender they choose,” Jackson wrote.
The Trevor Project, the LGBTQ+ youth suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization, condemned the ruling, saying it would compound the harm transgender and nonbinary young people already feel from anti-LGBTQ+ laws and political debates. Jaymes Black, the organization’s CEO, said the decision “only serve[s] to send a message to transgender and nonbinary young people that says, ‘you don’t belong.’” Black added, “But these young people do belong.”
The group cited its 2025 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People, which found that 94 percent of transgender and nonbinary young people said recent LGBTQ+-related policies, laws and debates caused them stress or anxiety, while 86 percent said they made them feel unsafe. The organization also said transgender and nonbinary young people in states with anti-transgender laws reported up to a 72 percent increase in past-year suicide attempts compared with those in states without such laws.
U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia, a California Democrat and one of the most powerful out LGBTQ+ members of Congress, told The Advocate shortly after the ruling that the decision fit into a broader pattern from the court.
“I’ve always believed that young people should have a chance to participate and learn teamwork and play in sports, and that includes all young people,” Garcia said. “Unfortunately, it’s not a surprise with the Supreme Court that they continue to roll back rights not just for LGBTQ+ people but for all people.”
Garcia said the decision underscored the need for LGBTQ+ people and allies to keep pressing for civil rights beyond Pride Month.
“I think it continues to reaffirm why we have to move forward and protest and be proud of who we are and use not just Pride, but every day of the year to advance the civil rights for all LGBTQ+ people,” he said. “And that includes trans people.”
In the majority opinion, the Supreme Court noted that transgender people deserve respect.
"We emphasize one last point," Kavanaugh wrote. "Most of the biological female and transgender student-athletes who are involved in transgender sports disputes around the country are teenagers or in their early twenties. Those student-athletes want to play sports. Their desire to compete warrants respect. No student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified."
This story is developing.
