On Transgender Youth in Sports

What the Court Decided, and What It Didn’t

Becky Pepper-Jackson runs cross-country and track in Bridgeport, West Virginia. This past May, she won a girls’ state championship in the shot put. She has identified as a girl since the third grade. She is, by every account I can find, the only openly transgender student athlete in her entire state.

This morning, the Supreme Court ruled that her state can keep her off the team.

The decision came in two consolidated cases, West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, the Idaho case brought by Lindsay Hecox. The vote was 6 to 3. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority. States, the Court held, may bar transgender girls and women from girls’ and women’s sports.

You will see this headline everywhere today. It is true. It is also incomplete, and it will cost many a needed clarity.

Two questions, two different answers

Every challenge to these sports bans rested on two separate legal arguments. The first was Title IX, the 1972 law banning sex discrimination in schools that take federal money. The second was the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the constitutional promise that government will treat people equally under the law.

The Court answered those two questions differently.

On Title IX, the justices were unanimous. All nine of them, including the three dissenters, agreed that these state bans do not violate Title IX. Kavanaugh grounded that in a 1974 amendment and the regulations that have long allowed schools to field separate teams by sex.

On the Constitution, the Court divided 6 to 3 along familiar lines. The majority held that sorting teams by what it called biological sex is a reasonable sex-based classification, and leaned on last year’s ruling in United States v. Skrmetti to get there. Kavanaugh wrote that asking judges to weigh each transgender athlete’s individual advantage would be, in his words, “an almost impossible task for a judge to perform on an equitable basis.”

The gap between those two answers is the part worth understanding. It comes down to what the Court chose not to decide.

The door left open

The Court did not ban transgender girls from sports. It ruled that states may ban them without violating Title IX or the Constitution.

Twenty-one states, including California and New York, currently let transgender girls compete on girls’ teams. The Court left every one of those policies standing. It declined to decide whether inclusive policies violate anyone’s rights. That question is still open.

The unanimous Title IX holding is why this matters. Shiwali Patel of the National Women’s Law Center put it plainly: Title IX does not require states to exclude transgender athletes. A state that includes them is following federal law. A state that bans them is also following federal law. The Court handed the decision back to the states and, for now, left both choices on the table.

That has a direct consequence. The federal government has been arguing it can pull funding from schools that include transgender athletes. This ruling does not hand it that power. As Patel noted, the administration cannot rewrite civil rights law on its own.

Fatima Goss Graves, the president of the National Women’s Law Center, still called the day a “devastating setback” for Title IX, and she is right about the harm. The line that held is narrow. It is also real, and people defending inclusive policies in their own states will be standing on it tomorrow.

The dissenters view

Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench, something justices do only when they want the country to hear it. She agreed the Title IX claim failed. She broke hard with the majority on the Constitution.

Her objection was about process as much as outcome. The majority, she wrote, settled a hard question without letting the facts develop, denying Becky Pepper-Jackson the chance to prove that a girl who never went through male puberty raises none of the competitive concerns the law claims to address. “Unjustified sex-based discrimination inflicts injury to personal dignity,” Sotomayor wrote, “regardless of the number of individuals affected.” She closed with a line worth sitting with. “Sports, of course, are often zero sum, but the law need not and should not be.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote separately to object that the majority reached further than it had to when it declared that the word sex in Title IX cannot mean anything beyond birth sex. Title IX, she wrote, “makes room for individuals to live in the gender they choose.”

The majority, for its part, did not write cruelly. Kavanaugh wrote that no athlete on either side “deserves to be ostracized or vilified,” and that a transgender athlete’s “desire to compete warrants respect.” Justice Clarence Thomas, in a concurrence, was blunter. “Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls,” he wrote, “even if they believe that they are.”

This is about our kids

I think of Becky Pepper-Jackson, and to Lindsay Hecox, and Rebekah Bruesehoff (who I had the pleasure of meeting at a Supreme Court rally last January), because the law reads clean as an abstraction yet hard as a fact about kids.

Strip away this case and you have a high schooler who is good at shot put, or field hockey, on a team, doing the ordinary work of growing up next to other kids. That is the thing at stake.

At a Senate hearing in late 2024, the head of the NCAA was asked how many of the roughly 510,000 college athletes in America are transgender. His answer was fewer than ten. The effort spent reaching the people inside that number has been enormous. The number itself has stayed very small.

I have written before that when we slow down and picture a specific kid, not a debate, not a headline, just a kid, the questions get simpler. They did not get simpler at the Court today. They are still simple at the kitchen table, where a parent looks at the child in front of them and decides whether that child deserves to belong.

Twenty-seven states will now keep their bans. Twenty-one will keep their doors open. The Court told us where the line sits. It did not tell us which side to stand on.

That part is still ours.

---

Sources

The ruling itself

• The slip opinion, West Virginia v. B.P.J., No. 24-43, consolidated with Little v. Hecox, No. 24-38, 609 U.S. ___ (U.S. Supreme Court, June 30, 2026). Majority opinion by Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett; concurrences by Thomas and Gorsuch; Sotomayor concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part, joined by Kagan and Jackson; Jackson filing separately.

Reporting on the decision

• NBC Washington and the Associated Press, “Supreme Court upholds state bans on transgender athletes in girls and women’s sports,” June 30, 2026. Source for the 6-3 constitutional holding alongside the unanimous Title IX finding.

• The Hill on the ruling, “Supreme Court upholds transgender athlete bans in schools,” June 30, 2026. Source for the 6-3 ideological split and Kavanaugh’s controlling passage.

• Fox News sports desk, “Supreme Court upholds West Virginia, Idaho transgender sports bans 6-3,” June 30, 2026. Source for the opinion lineup and state attorney general statements.

• CBS News coverage, “Supreme Court upholds state bans on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports,” June 30, 2026.

• Forbes legal coverage, “Supreme Court Upholds Bans On Transgender Women In Sports,” June 30, 2026.

• Bloomberg Law analysis, “Supreme Court Lets States Ban Trans Athletes in Female Teams,” June 30, 2026.

Reaction from advocates

• National Women’s Law Center, statement of Fatima Goss Graves and Shiwali Patel, June 30, 2026. Source for the “devastating setback” framing and the point that Title IX does not require excluding transgender athletes. (Add direct press-release link.)

• Human Rights Campaign press release, statement of Kelley Robinson, June 30, 2026. Notes the ruling is not a nationwide ban and that the Court declined to set a level of scrutiny.

• GLAD Law statement, “States May Ban Transgender Girls from Girls’ Sports; Inclusive Policies Remain Legal,” statement of Jennifer Levi, June 30, 2026.

• American Civil Liberties Union, statement of Joshua Block, June 30, 2026. The ACLU represented both plaintiffs. (Add direct press-release link.)

• Lambda Legal, statement of Sasha Buchert, June 30, 2026. (Add direct press-release link.)

• The Trevor Project, statement of Jaymes Black, June 30, 2026. (Add direct press-release link.)

Context and data

• U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, hearing testimony of NCAA President Charlie Baker, December 2024. Source for “fewer than 10” transgender athletes among roughly 510,000 in the NCAA.

• Movement Advancement Project, tracking of state laws restricting transgender athletic participation. Source for the count of states with bans and states with inclusive policies.