Supreme Court Seems Ready to Ban Trans Kids From Playing Sports

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared poised Tuesday to allow states to ban transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams.

The court heard oral arguments for two cases from Idaho and West Virginia in which lawyers for the trans teens argued that the state laws they’d challenged relied on broad generalization about the sexes, and their supposed biological advantages, that did not apply to their specific clients, The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, solicitor generals from these states insisted that biological sex matters in sports because of supposed competitive advantages.

The first case was from Idaho, involving college senior Lindsay Hecox, who has attempted to drop her case in order to proceed through the rest of school “without the extraordinary pressures of this litigation and related public scrutiny.”

The second case involves Becky Pepper-Jackson, a West Virginia high school student, whose lawyer Joshua Block of the ACLU argued that his client did not hold an unfair advantage to her teammates and opponents because she had never gone through male puberty and had been taking hormone blockers.

While the conservative justices acknowledged that there was some scientific disagreement about competitive advantages between the sexes, they still seemed inclined to agree with states. Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that Title IX did not protect transgender athletes from discrimination because it prevented discrimination based on “sex,” not gender identity.

“I hate, hate that a kid who wants to play sports might not be able to play sports. Hate that. But we have kind of a zero-sum game for a lot of teens,” he said, arguing that a transgender girl will inevitably take the spot entitled to a cisgender girl.

Of course, it’s not clear that there are that many transgender female athletes to begin with. Charlie Baker, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, reported in 2024 that of the 510,000 total college athletes, there were fewer than 10 transgender students.

Trapped in the minority, the liberal justices suggested that the plaintiffs could seek “as applied” challenges to their states laws, meaning the cases could go back through lower courts separately to demonstrate that the two girls did not possess the unfair advantages implied by their assigned sex at birth.