Supreme Court upholds state bans on transgender girls in girls' sports
The 6-3 decision from Justice Brett Kavanaugh broke along ideological lines.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state bans on transgender girls from participating in girls' and women's competitive sports, reversing a pair of lower court decisions that had blocked the bans as violations of Title IX and the 14th Amendment.
The 6-3 decision written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh broke along ideological lines.
"Some might ask: What is the harm in allowing an additional athlete to compete in women's or girls' sports? That sentiment, though understandable, misunderstands the nature and reality of sports," Kavanaugh wrote. "Sports are highly competitive and generally zero sum. At almost every turn, someone wins and someone loses."
The ruling in a pair of cases from West Virginia and Idaho effectively upholds laws in those two states and bolsters similar laws or regulations in 27 others that block transgender girls from teams consistent with their gender identity.
The conservative majority rejected arguments advanced by two transgender student athletes that the laws excluding them from girls teams amount to sex discrimination.
The court's three liberal justices dissented in the case but did so on largely technical grounds.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused the court of rushing to a conclusion on whether the laws might violate Equal Protection under the 14th Amendment without adequately considering all the facts.
"This litigation implicates deeply sensitive, contentious and evolving issues," Sotomayor wrote. "These circumstances demand exercising judicial restraint, not rushing to answer conclusively difficult questions without sufficient evidentiary development."
Notably, Sotomayor and Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed with the conservatives that bans on transgender athletes do not violate Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that has promoted equal opportunities for women and girls in athletics.
The decision marks the first time the nation's high court has weighed in on the heated national debate over transgender athletes.
President Donald Trump, who campaigned heavily in 2024 against transgender girls participating in women's sports and continues to speak about the issue frequently at rallies and events, celebrated the ruling.
"BIG WIN: The United States Supreme Court just RULED AGAINST MEN PLAYING IN WOMEN’S SPORTS. Wow! That takes that ridiculous situation off the table!!!" Trump wrote in a social media post.
Sixty-nine percent of Americans believe transgender girls should only be allowed to play on boys' teams, consistent with their gender assigned at birth, according to a June 2025 Gallup survey.
The court's ruling was a major setback for plaintiff Becky Pepper Jackson, 15, the only known openly transgender athlete in West Virginia in any sport. Jackson, who began identifying as a girl in third grade, participates in shot put and discus on the high school girls' team.
She is one of the estimated 122,000 transgender American teenagers who participate in high school sports, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA. For trans teens and their families, the dispute has involved a matter of immutable identity and equal opportunity.
"She knew and we knew that we had an uphill battle ahead of us, but [today's decision is a] very disappointing result for transgender girls who just want the same opportunities to participate in school sports that cisgender girls have," said Josh Block, senior ACLU counsel and lead attorney for Jackson.
Block said advocates for trans teenagers were heartened by the narrowness of the decision. The court "didn't issue a broader decision saying that Title IX in general didn't protect transgender students. it didn't say that other states couldn't make a different policy choice," he said.
Twenty-one states allow transgender girls to compete on girls' sports teams, including California and New York, which have laws explicitly protecting the right of trans girls to play. The Supreme Court’s ruling does not impact those states, at least for now.
For many states and top U.S. athletic organizations, however, including the U.S. Olympic Committee and NCAA, the inclusion of trans athletes has been seen as creating an unfair and unsafe playing field.
The competitive advantage boys and men have physically over girls and women has been well established in physically demanding sports by medical research and serves as a primary basis for distinctions between the sexes in athletics.
Studies have shown testosterone produced during male puberty does lead to more muscle mass, larger hearts and lungs, greater body height and longer limbs on average for boys and men, according to the American College of Sports Medicine.
Yet many transgender teens, including Jackson, who have received gender-affirming medical treatment from a young age argue that they lack any physiological advantage because they have not undergone male puberty.
Justice Kavanaugh and the court's majority, however, said that remains a contested area of scientific debate. "When there are open questions regarding basic factual issues before medical authorities and other regulatory bodies," he wrote, "there is little basis for judicial responses in absolute terms."
Justice Sotomayor argued in dissent that the court should have allowed the fact-finding to play out.
"No one disputes, when it comes to sex identified at birth, males generally have an inherent athletic advantage over females in playing sports. [Becky], however, contends that this generalization does not hold true for a discrete, easily identifiable group: transgender girls who have never experienced an endogenous male puberty, who receive gender-affirming treatment, and who are, she says, thus similarly situated to cisgender girls," Sotomayor wrote. "For that group, she argues, neither of West Virginia’s interests is furthered by excluding them from girls’ and women’s sports. The Court should have affirmed the Fourth Circuit’s decision to remand for further factfinding."
When West Virginia's law takes effect, Jackson will no longer be allowed to participate in girls' competitive sports leagues. Competing with boys, she said, would "go against who I am."
"I've been a girl forever, and playing on the guys' team is going backwards," she told ABC News in an interview last year.
Idaho college student Lindsay Hecox, a former track and cross-country runner who was barred from trying out for her school teams, sued over her state's ban in 2020. Last year, she asked the Supreme Court to drop her case because she no longer wished to compete in sports and didn't want to be in the spotlight. However, Idaho fought to keep the case alive.
She did not immediately comment on the outcome.
Lower courts had concluded separately that the state bans discriminate "on the basis of sex" in violation of Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that has promoted equal opportunities for women and girls in athletics, and the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause.
The Supreme Court's conservative majority reversed those decisions and reinstated the laws.
"The interests in safety and competitive fairness are important for the purposes of equal protection analysis. And the states' sex-based classification -- limiting women's and girls' sports to biological females -- is substantially related to those interests," Kavanaugh wrote in Tuesday's opinion.
Last year, the same majority upheld a Tennessee law banning some gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender minors, rejecting claims that the law discriminated "on the basis of sex" and saying that states should have leeway to regulate health care in an area of scientific uncertainty.
In 2020, however, the high court concluded in a landmark decision that a Michigan transgender woman fired by her employer for being transgender was discriminated against "on the basis of sex" under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Justice Neil Gorsuch explained in his majority opinion at the time that her termination was "for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex."
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