The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams, in another setback for transgender people. The court's conservative majority ruled that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia don't violate the Constitution or the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education. More than two dozen other Republican-led states have adopted bans on female transgender athletes, and the decision extends to them as well.
Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Bridgeport, West Virginia, has been taking puberty-blocking medication, has publicly identified as a girl since age 8 and has been issued a West Virginia birth certificate recognizing her as female. She is the only transgender person who has sought to compete in girls sports in West Virginia. Pepper-Jackson has progressed from a back-of-the-pack cross-country runner in middle school to statewide champion in the shot put. She beat the second-place finisher by two feet in last month's West Virginia championship meet. In the Idaho case, Lindsay Hecox sued over the state's first-in-the-nation ban for the chance to try out for the women's track and cross-country teams at Boise State University in Idaho. She didn't make either squad because she was too slow, her lawyer Kathleen Hartnett told the court during arguments in January, but she competed in club-level soccer and running.
Idaho's law, state Solicitor General Alan Hurst said, is necessary for fair competition because, where sports are concerned, men and women are obviously not the same. Lawyers for Pepper-Jackson argued that such distinctions generally make sense but that their client has none of those advantages because of the unique circumstances of her early transition. NCAA president Charlie Baker told Congress in 2024 that he was aware of only 10 transgender athletes out of more than half a million students on college teams. Despite the small numbers, the issue has taken on outsize importance. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after President Donald Trump, a Republican, signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults strongly or somewhat favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to compete only on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were strongly or somewhat opposed and about one-quarter did not have an 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 U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.