Supreme Court Upholds State Bans on Transgender Athletes
· Time
The Supreme Court on Monday upheld two state laws that ban transgender athletes from competing in sporting events for girls and women at public schools—the latest blow the conservative-majority Court has dealt to transgender rights.
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In a 6-3 decision that split along ideological lines in both a case out of West Virginia and one out of Idaho, the Justices ruled that state schools can restrict women’s and girls’ sports for biological females under Title IX, a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in federally-funded educational programs.
“Put simply, the statute and regulations do not speak to that issue in a way that could properly be interpreted to require schools to allow biological males to participate in women’s and girls’ sports,” the majority opinion, penned by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writes.
In the dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor contends that some “unresolved factual questions” of the case still need to be litigated in the lower court, and that the majority did not give the plaintiff a “fair and full opportunity” before making a ruling. She also criticized the majority opinion that limits the Title IX protection to biological sex.
“Title IX makes room for individuals to live in the gender they choose; it cares not just about sex assigned at birth but also about individuals’ ability to match (or not) their gender presentation to their gender identity,” Sotomayor writes.
The cases before the Supreme Court stemmed from lawsuits that a now-high school student in West Virginia and a college student in Idaho filed against their states’ respective laws, which mandate that athletes must compete in sporting events based on their “biological sex.”
The plaintiffs’ attorneys in both cases argued that the bans violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. The plaintiff’s attorneys in the West Virginia case also argued that the state’s law violates Title IX.
The solicitors general for Idaho and West Virginia, meanwhile, argued that the laws are intended to ensure fair and equal opportunities for girls and women in sports.
As well as upholding those states’ bans, the justices’ rulings also serve to bolster similar restrictions on transgender athletes’ participation in sports that more than two dozen other states have passed. Idaho was the first U.S. state to enact such a ban, when Republican Gov. Brad Little signed the bill into law in 2020.
In addition to the growing number of state restrictions in recent years, the decisions on Monday come after the Trump Administration has made a number of moves to target transgender rights.
On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order that proclaimed the U.S. will only recognize “two sexes, male and female,” and called gender identity “disconnected from biological reality.” In February, the President signed another Executive Order, called “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which instructed federal agencies to pull their funding from schools that allow transgender students to participate on female sports teams.
Transgender rights suffered another major loss in the Supreme Court last year, when the justices upheld a Tennessee law that banned gender-affirming care for minors in the state.
Many transgender Americans have reported leaving the U.S.—or have said that they plan to—amid the mounting anti-trans policies in the country.