The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state laws in West Virginia and Idaho that bar transgender girls and women from competing on female school sports teams, ruling 6-3 along ideological lines that states may determine eligibility based on biological sex without running afoul of Title IX or the Constitution. The decision, issued on the final day of the term, resolves two closely watched cases, West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, and reverses lower-court rulings that had sided with the athletes.
Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said schools may restrict eligibility for girls' and women's teams to those born female. 'Consistent with Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, we hold that the States may maintain women's and girls' sports for biological females,' Kavanaugh wrote. 'They may determine eligibility for women's and girls' sports based on biological sex. The Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women's and girls' sports throughout America.'
The Court's three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented from the majority's holding that the bans do not violate the Equal Protection Clause, but agreed with the conservatives' reading that Title IX did not compel the athletes' inclusion. The split left the bans intact while exposing a deep disagreement over whether laws that single out transgender students for exclusion warrant the heightened constitutional scrutiny courts apply to sex-based classifications.
The cases were brought by two transgender athletes. Lindsay Hecox, now 24, sued in Idaho after a 2020 state law blocked her from trying out for the women's track and cross-country teams at Boise State University. The West Virginia case was filed on behalf of Becky Pepper-Jackson, identified in court papers as B.P.J., a teenager who has identified as a girl since elementary school and has taken puberty blockers and estrogen; she was barred by a 2021 state law from competing on her school's girls' teams.
Both athletes had won at the lower courts. Federal appeals panels had found that the bans likely violated the Equal Protection Clause, allowing Hecox and Pepper-Jackson to keep competing while their cases proceeded. Tuesday's decision wipes away those victories and hands a decisive win to the states, which argued that preserving competitive fairness and safety in female sports was a legitimate, even compelling, interest that the Constitution permits them to pursue.
The practical reach is broad. Roughly 27 states have enacted laws in recent years restricting transgender participation in school sports, and the ruling effectively forecloses the principal federal challenge to them. State legislatures that had hesitated while the question was unsettled now have a clear signal that such laws can stand, and advocates on both sides expect the decision to accelerate similar measures and to shape fights over locker rooms, college eligibility and athletic scholarships.
Supporters of the bans, including the Trump administration, which had urged the Court to uphold the laws, cast the decision as a vindication of women's sports and of states' authority to define eligibility. Civil-rights groups and the athletes' lawyers condemned it as a blow that strips transgender young people of the chance to play alongside their peers and signals that the Court's majority will tolerate laws drawing sharp lines around gender identity.
The ruling caps a term in which the Court repeatedly delivered for the conservative legal movement and for President Trump's assertions of executive power, from a decision a day earlier letting the president fire independent agency heads to orders reshaping immigration enforcement and voting procedures. For transgender Americans, it narrows the constitutional avenues left to challenge laws targeting their participation in schools, sports and other areas of public life, and shifts the battle decisively to statehouses and the ballot box.