WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state laws banning transgender girls and women from playing on school sports teams, in another setback for transgender people.
The six-justice conservative majority, which has repeatedly ruled against transgender Americans in the past year, ruled that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia do not violate the Constitution. The court unanimously agreed that the ban on transgender girls and women also does not conflict with the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court that “states may support girls’ and women’s sports for biological women.”
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More than two dozen other Republican-led states have enacted bans on transgender athletes, and the move looks set to extend to them as well.
That left unresolved lawsuits challenging state laws and regulations in Connecticut, California and elsewhere that allow transgender athletes to compete in accordance with their gender identity.
Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Bridgeport, West Virginia, who takes puberty-blocking medications, has publicly identified herself as a girl since age 8 and received a West Virginia birth certificate recognizing her as female. She is the only transgender person who has sought to compete in a women’s sport in West Virginia.
Pepper-Jackson went from average cross country runner in high school to state champion shot putter. She beat the runner-up by 2 feet at the West Virginia championship meet last month.
In the Idaho case, Lindsey Hecox sued over a first-in-the-nation ban on the opportunity to try out for the women’s track and cross country teams at Boise State University in Idaho. She didn’t make any teams because she “was too slow,” her lawyer Kathleen Hartnett told the court during arguments in January, but she competed in soccer and track at club level.
Prominent women in sports have spoken on both sides. Tennis champion Martina Navratilova, swimmers Summer Sanders and Donna de Varona, and beach volleyball player Kerry Walsh Jennings support government bans. Soccer stars Megan Rapinoe and Becky Sauerbrunn, as well as basketball players Sue Bird and Brianna Stewart, support transgender athletes.
In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that LGBTQ people are protected by a landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace, finding that “sex plays an unmistakable role” in employers’ decisions to punish transgender people for traits and behavior they otherwise tolerate.
But last year, six conservative justices on the nine-member court refused to apply a similar analysis when they upheld state bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors.
States that support bans on transgender athletes argue that there is no basis to extend the regulation banning workplace discrimination to Title IX.
Idaho’s law, said Attorney General Alan Hurst, “is necessary for fair competition because men and women are clearly not the same when it comes to sports.”
Republican President Donald Trump applauded Tuesday’s decision, calling it a “BIG VICTORY” in a social media post.
Pepper-Jackson’s lawyers argued that such distinctions generally make sense, but that their client has none of those benefits due to the unique circumstances of her early transition. In Hecox’s case, her lawyers wanted the court to throw out the case because she had given up trying to play on women’s teams.
NCAA President Charlie Baker told Congress in 2024 that he knew of only 10 transgender athletes out of more than half a million students on college teams. But despite the small number, this problem has become of great importance.
Baker’s NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees have banned transgender women from women’s sports after President Donald Trump, a Republican, signed an executive order aimed at banning their participation.
The public generally supports the restrictions. An October 2025 poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults were “strongly” or “somewhat” in favor of having transgender children and teens compete only on sports teams corresponding to the sex they were assigned at birth rather than the gender with which they identify, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” against and about a quarter did not had their own opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people ages 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the United States, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.