Supreme Court upholds state laws banning transgender girls and women
from school athletic teams
[July 01, 2026]
By MARK SHERMAN and LINDSAY WHITEHURST
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 six-justice conservative majority, which has repeatedly
ruled against transgender Americans in the past year, ruled that state
bans in Idaho and West Virginia don’t violate the Constitution. The
court unanimously agreed that barring transgender girls and women also
doesn't run afoul of the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits
sex discrimination in education.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court that, “states may maintain
women's and girls' sports for biological females" to address safety and
competitive fairness concerns. “The Constitution and Title IX do not
require an overhaul of women’s and girls’ sports throughout America."
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.
Left unresolved by the outcome are lawsuits challenging state laws and
regulations in Connecticut, California and elsewhere that permit
transgender athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, saying from the bench that the
majority opinion was wrong to reject an equal-protection claim from
16-year-old Becky Pepper-Jackson.
With the science still evolving, transgender students shouldn't
automatically be shut out of team sports, she said. “We just simply do
not know scientifically that transgender students pose dangers,” she
said, reading from a dissent joined by her liberal colleagues.
Pepper-Jackson, a 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.
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.
Kavanaugh, who has coached girls' basketball, underlined the importance
of women's sports and athletes' dedication. “No student-athlete on
either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender,
deserves to be ostracized or vilified,” he wrote.
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The U.S. Supreme Court is seen Monday, June 29, 2026, in Washington.
(AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
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.”
Republican President Donald Trump applauded Tuesday's decision,
calling it a “BIG WIN” in a social-media post.
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.
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