U.S. Supreme Court upholds West Virginia law, rules transgender women cannot compete on school athletic teams
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- 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 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 seems certain to extend to them as well.
“Today’s decision will be remembered as one of the most important victories for women’s athletics since the enactment of Title IX itself,” said West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey. "Years ago, as Attorney General of West Virginia, I brought this case to the Supreme Court because I knew that protecting women's sports was consistent with the Constitution and a matter of basic fairness. That principle brought West Virginia to the center of a national debate and ultimately before the highest court in the land.”
Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Bridgeport, W.Va. 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 -- a student from John Marshall High School -- by 2 feet in last month's West Virginia championship meet.
"For far too long, Americans watched as this debate unfolded and wondered whether the promise made to generations of women and girls would endure,” Morrisey added. “Today, the Supreme Court answered that question. The protections established under Title IX remain meaningful, the integrity of women’s sports remains worth preserving, and states retain the authority to defend fair competition.
"This began in West Virginia, but its impact reaches every corner of the country. Future generations of female athletes will benefit from the certainty, fairness, and opportunity this decision protects. West Virginia stood its ground. We defended a simple principle most Americans instinctively understand: that women’s sports exist to provide women and girls a fair opportunity to compete and succeed. Today, I am grateful to my team, who worked tirelessly on this issue for years, and to our current Attorney General, who saw this case through.”
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.
Prominent women in sports have weighed in on both sides. Tennis champion Martina Navratilova, swimmers Summer Sanders and Donna de Varona and beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh Jennings are supporting the state bans. Soccer stars Megan Rapinoe and Becky Sauerbrunn and basketball players Sue Bird and Breanna Stewart back the transgender athletes.
In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled 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, the six conservative justices on the nine-member court declined to apply the same sort of analysis when they upheld state bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors.
The states supporting the prohibitions on transgender athletes argued there is no reason to extend the ruling barring workplace discrimination to Title IX.
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. In Hecox's case, her lawyers wanted the court to dismiss the case because she had forsworn trying to play on women's teams.
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. But despite the small numbers, the issue has taken on outsize importance.
Baker's NCAA and the U.S. 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.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. 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.