U.S. Court Upholds Ban On Transgender Athletes In Girls’ Sports

The United States Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state laws in Idaho and West Virginia that bar transgender women and girls from competing on female school and college sports teams, in a ruling expected to strengthen similar bans already in force across 27 American states.

The decision resolves two consolidated cases, brought by transgender athletes Lindsay Hecox and Becky Pepper-Jackson, who had challenged the laws as violations of the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee and of Title IX, the federal law that bars sex discrimination in education.

Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, passed in 2020, was the first law of its kind in the United States, requiring public school and college sports teams to be designated by biological sex and barring transgender girls and women from competing on female teams.

West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act followed a year later in 2021. Both laws had previously been blocked by lower federal courts, which ruled in favour of the two athletes who challenged them.

The Supreme Court heard more than three hours of oral arguments in the case in January, during which several of the court’s conservative justices expressed scepticism over claims that gender-transition treatments eliminate physiological advantages for transgender athletes in competitive sport.

Idaho had argued that “male athletes have numerous recognized physical and physiological advantages over females that begin before puberty and persist despite reduced circulating testosterone,” and that states should not be second-guessed for restricting women’s sports on that basis.

Tuesday’s ruling is the latest in a series of decisions by the court’s conservative majority narrowing the legal protections available to transgender people in the United States.

The court previously upheld a Tennessee law banning gender-transition care for minors, and separately allowed the Trump administration to bar transgender people from military service and restrict gender markers on U.S. passports.

The ruling forms part of the Supreme Court’s final batch of decisions for its current term, which also includes an eagerly awaited ruling on President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end automatic citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented parents.