The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Tuesday to uphold state laws in West Virginia and Idaho barring transgender girls and women from school sports, a decision that resolves years of lower-court challenges to such bans. Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said in his 29-page opinion that the Constitution permits states to maintain sex-separated teams based on biological sex. The court was unanimous on a federal anti-discrimination question, but split 6-3 on the equal protection question.
The case, West Virginia v. B.P.J., consolidated with Little v. Hecox, was argued on January 13, 2026, with two young athletes at its center. Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 15-year-old West Virginia runner identified in court filings as B.P.J., has identified as female since the third grade and takes medication to delay male puberty. Lindsay Hecox, a transgender woman who wanted to try out for the women’s track and cross-country teams at Boise State University, has since stopped competing in college sports and asked the court to dismiss her own claims as moot. The holding leaves roughly half the country free to keep transgender athletes off girls’ teams and a number of states likely to follow.
What the Court Decided
On the federal statutory question, the court spoke with one voice. All nine justices agreed that Title IX, the 1972 law banning sex discrimination in schools, permits school districts to operate teams reserved for biological females, with Kavanaugh’s reasoning on that point drawing no recorded dissent.
On the constitutional question, the court split. Kavanaugh held that the laws’ sex-based classifications were permissible because each is what he tied to an important governmental interest in athletic safety and fairness. That framework applies intermediate scrutiny, the heightened standard courts use for sex-based distinctions, and it is the standard the majority chose over a more permissive test that would have given states more room elsewhere.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred in the judgment in part and dissented in part, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Sotomayor wrote that the majority “credits the West Virginia Legislature’s concern that a class consisting of transgender girls like B. P. J. is large enough to pose an existential threat to girls’ sports, but at the same time holds that this class is too small to be protected by the Equal Protection Clause.” Kelly O’Neill, an attorney for Hecox, called the ruling “profoundly unfair” in a statement after the decision. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch filed separate concurring opinions, and the full West Virginia v. B.P.J. opinion is published on the court’s website.
Six Years of State Legislation
The bans were built state by state over six years before reaching the justices. Idaho passed the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act in 2020, the first state law of its kind in the country. West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act followed a year later, drawn in part from model language circulated by advocacy groups including the American Principles Project, which had cultivated conservative legal activists in many of the states that followed. By January 2026, twenty-five other states had passed their own versions of the bans. The Trump administration urged the justices to take the cases and filed briefs defending them.
- Idaho (2020): first-in-the-nation ban; covers public schools from elementary through college
- West Virginia (2021): Save Women’s Sports Act; applies to public secondary schools and colleges
- Twenty-five other states: similar bans since Idaho’s law
- Half the country: still permits transgender athletes on teams matching gender identity, per the Movement Advancement Project
The two named challengers were both athletes. Becky Pepper-Jackson, the West Virginia teenager, has run on her middle school’s girls’ track team and is identified only as B.P.J. in court filings; Lindsay Hecox had hoped to compete in women’s track and cross-country at Boise State University and played club-level women’s soccer while the litigation moved through the courts.
The Supreme Court has handed down a landmark victory for fairness and sanity by restoring sex-based categories that protect female athletes. Girls deserve their own playing fields and private spaces, free from biological men who seek to invade them.
Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, made the statement in the immediate aftermath of the ruling. Joshua Block, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represents Pepper-Jackson, called the same decision “a devastating decision for transgender girls who just want to have the same opportunities that other girls do.” The two sides squared off in oral argument on January 13, 2026, with the Trump administration backing the states in court.
Both plaintiffs had won in the lower courts. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled that West Virginia’s law violated Title IX because it discriminated on the basis of sex, while the 9th Circuit reached a similar equal protection conclusion about Idaho. Both states, joined by the Trump administration, asked the justices to reverse. The court did, in a 6-3 holding on equal protection and a unanimous outcome on Title IX, and the case file for B.P.J.’s lawsuit is published on the ACLU’s case page.
The Reasoning That Could Reach Farther
The most consequential part of Kavanaugh’s opinion may not be the holding. By describing the West Virginia and Idaho laws as classifications based on biological sex rather than as anti-transgender classifications, the majority activated intermediate scrutiny, the heightened standard courts apply when a policy sorts people by sex. That standard would now govern any future state effort to bar transgender people from bathrooms, locker rooms, military service, or other sex-segregated programs. The conservative majority could have chosen a lighter standard that would have made other anti-transgender policies easier to defend in court. Instead, Kavanaugh adopted the legal path that gives transgender challengers the most doctrinal room, and the case docket is published at the Supreme Court docket for B.P.J.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett had pointed this way last year in the Tennessee ruling, United States v. Skrmetti, writing that transgender people lack “obvious, immutable or distinguishing characteristics” that would make them a suspect class. The court’s continued treatment of gender identity claims as a species of sex discrimination preserves intermediate scrutiny as a tool available to transgender plaintiffs in future cases. Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst, said the framework leaves open future challenges “from bathrooms to military service.”
West Virginia may well have satisfied its burden and seen its ban upheld. The point, rather, is that this court’s equal protection precedents require a very different approach to (Jackson’s) claim than the one the majority follows today.
In her partial dissent filed with the ruling on Tuesday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, argued that the majority arrives at two contradictory conclusions about the same group of plaintiffs: large enough to threaten girls’ sports but too small to merit equal protection review. The majority opinion itself notes that B.P.J. is the only transgender girl publicly identified in West Virginia who sought to play school sports. University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone called the ruling “fairly narrow and doesn’t go much beyond the question of school athletics.” Stone added that “that will be very different from saying trans people can’t be doctors, can’t be lawyers, or anything like that,” and said future challenges to other anti-transgender restrictions remain possible under the framework Kavanaugh chose.
Public Backing and the Reality on Campus
Public support for the kinds of bans the court just upheld is broad. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in April found roughly two-thirds of respondents backed excluding transgender girls and women from girls’ and women’s school and college sports. Support broke sharply along partisan lines: 92% of Republicans and 44% of Democrats. The same divide plays out in state legislatures, where Republican-majority bodies have moved quickly on bans and Democratic-led states have resisted the Trump administration’s Title IX investigations. The court’s ruling, by removing ambiguity from how federal law treats the question, may make upcoming fights in those chambers more decisive.
The actual population of transgender college athletes is far smaller than the political fight suggests. NCAA President Charlie Baker told a congressional hearing in 2024 that he was aware of fewer than 10 of 510,000 NCAA athletes being transgender. The NCAA revised its policy in 2025 to bar athletes assigned male at birth from women’s sports, after the Trump administration issued an executive order on the issue. The International Olympic Committee followed suit in 2026, restricting women’s events to “biological females.”
Half the country still allows transgender athletes to compete on teams matching their gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a research group tracking state LGBTQ policy. Blue-state attorneys general have resisted the Trump administration’s Title IX investigations, sometimes in open defiance.
Ballot-box fights are coming. Colorado and Washington state voters will decide ballot questions in November on whether to roll back protections for transgender athletes. A Maine ballot initiative failed to qualify earlier in 2025 because it did not gather enough validated signatures, leaving the question off the November ballot. Other states will see the ruling inform the next round of legislation, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights has published its own analysis of the questions Tuesday’s ruling did not resolve.
Sarah Hartley, a lawyer at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner who previously played Division I squash, said the practical impact will land hardest at the levels where most students compete. “The vast majority of kids who play in middle school don’t go on to play in high school,” she said, adding that the ruling formalizes a de facto policy already in place at most schools.
What’s Next for the Docket
Kavanaugh closed his opinion with a passage meant to soften the blow. “Most of the biological female and transgender student-athletes who are involved in transgender sports disputes around the country are teenagers or in their early twenties,” he wrote. “Those student athletes want to play sports. Their desire to compete warrants respect.” Sotomayor dismissed the closing flourish in her dissent.
The next major transgender case is already on the docket. In the closing days of the term, the justices agreed to hear an appeal from Washington state parents challenging laws that allow runaway minors to receive some transgender medical care without parental notice. The court has previously intervened on the administration’s behalf in cases involving transgender service members and passports, while declining to step in on a South Carolina bathroom policy. Temple University law professor Dara Purvis, who signed an amicus brief supporting B.P.J., said the pattern has gone in one direction. “The court has been completely consistent on constitutional arguments, saying that trans people are not protected by the equal protection clause, and increasingly saying that trans people essentially don’t exist,” Purvis said.
Kavanaugh was on the losing side six years ago when the court extended civil rights protections to LGBTQ workers, in Bostock v. Clayton County. He wrote Tuesday that “no student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified,” and his larger framework leaves room for further fights in the courts and at the ballot box.
