The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams. The court’s six-justice conservative majority ruled that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia don’t violate the Constitution.
Background
The court unanimously agreed that barring transgender girls and women also doesn’t run afoul of the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court that, “states may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females.”
More than two dozen other Republican-led states have adopted bans on female transgender athletes, and the decision seems certain to extend to them as well. Left unresolved by the outcome are lawsuits challenging state laws and regulations in Connecticut, California, and elsewhere that permit transgender athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity.
Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Bridgeport, West Virginia, has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since age 8. She is the only transgender person who has sought to compete in girls sports in West Virginia. Pepper-Jackson has progressed from a back-of-the-pack cross-country runner in middle school to statewide champion in the shot put.
Reactions
Prominent women in sports have weighed in on both sides. Tennis champion Martina Navratilova, swimmers Summer Sanders and Donna de Varona, and beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh Jennings are supporting the state bans. Soccer stars Megan Rapinoe and Becky Sauerbrunn and basketball players Sue Bird and Breanna Stewart back the transgender athletes.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to compete only on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with.
Original reporting: Alabama News Network — read the source article.
