Supreme Court Seems Ready to Ban Trans Kids From Playing Sports
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared ready Tuesday to allow states to ban transgender athletes from playing on women’s and women’s sports teams.
The court heard oral arguments in two cases in Idaho and West Virginia in which attorneys for trans teens argued that the state laws they challenged relied on broad generalizations about the sexes and their purported biological advantages that did not apply to their specific clients. The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, the solicitors general of these states insisted that biological sex was important in sports because of supposed competitive advantages.
The first case came from Idaho, involving Lindsay Hecox, a university student, who attempted to drop her case in order to continue her studies at the rest of the school “without the extraordinary pressures of this litigation and the public scrutiny associated with it.”
The second case involves Becky Pepper-Jackson, a high school student from West Virginia. Pepper-Jackson’s Attorney Joshua Block of the ACLU argued that his client did not have an unfair advantage over her teammates and opponents because she never reached male puberty and was taking hormone blockers.
Although the conservative justices acknowledged that there was some scientific disagreement about competitive advantages between the sexes, they nonetheless seemed inclined to side with the states. Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that Title IX does not protect transgender athletes from discrimination because it prevents discrimination based on “sex,” not gender identity.
“I hate, hate that a kid who wants to play sports isn’t able to play sports. I hate that. But we have kind of a zero-sum game for a lot of teenagers,” he said. saidarguing that a transgender girl will inevitably take the place reserved for a cisgender girl.
Of course, it’s not clear that there are that many transgender female athletes. Charlie Baker, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, reported by 2024, 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 challenge their state’s laws “as applied,” meaning the cases could be moved to lower courts separately to demonstrate that the two girls did not possess the unfair advantages implied by their sex assigned at birth.
