The Supreme Court is hearing back-to-back cases on Tuesday from a pair of transgender athletes that will test the constitutionality of state laws barring their participation on girls’ and women’s sports teams.
The outcome of the cases from West Virginia and Idaho will put the justices back at the center of a contentious political issue with implications for the 25 other states with similar laws and for athletes who compete in school and collegiate sports around the country.
Becky Pepper-Jackson, a high school sophomore from West Virginia, and Lindsay Hecox, a college senior in Idaho, challenged the laws, which require that participation on sports teams for boys and girls be based on “biological sex,” defined as a person’s sex assigned at birth.
The Trump administration has targeted the participation of transgender athletes in sports and the rights of transgender people more broadly. President Trump in February directed agencies to withdraw federal funding from schools that allow transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports. The N.C.A.A. then announced it would bar transgender women from competing.
The Supreme Court has not formally addressed the legal issues surrounding transgender athletes until now. But in June, the court upheld a Tennessee law banning some medical treatments for transgender adolescents, dividing along ideological lines in its opinion. The decision was a major setback for transgender rights, after the court ruled in 2020 that a federal civil rights law protected gay and transgender employees from workplace discrimination.
The athletes in both of Tuesday’s cases argue that the West Virginia and Idaho laws violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, which requires the government to have valid reasons for treating people differently. Ms. Pepper-Jackson, who sued to join her middle school’s girls’ cross-country team when she was 11, also asserted that her state’s statute violates Title IX, the 1972 federal law that bars sex discrimination in schools, by denying her access to the school’s athletic program and treating her worse than her peers.
In a twist, Ms. Hecox has tried to drop her case. She has told the court there is no longer a live controversy for the justices to decide because she has stopped playing women’s sports. In a court filing, her lawyers have said she wishes to focus on graduating from college “without the extraordinary pressures of this litigation and related public scrutiny.” The justices have deferred a decision about what to do with the case until after Tuesday’s argument.
The Trump administration and lawyers for the states said in court filings that the participation of transgender female athletes threatened to undermine five decades of progress since the passage of Title IX, which has led to major increases in opportunities and participation for women in sports.
Women and girls have “lost places on sports teams, surrendered spots on championship podiums and suffered injuries competing against bigger, faster and stronger males,” according to a court filing from the office of West Virginia’s attorney general, John McCuskey.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer and the state attorneys general said both Title IX and the 14th Amendment’s equal protection guarantee have long permitted sex-separated sports teams, to account for biological differences between men and women.
Lawyers for both athletes, however, said the state laws rely on broad generalizations about the sexes that should not apply to their clients, who they assert do not have a competitive edge over athletes assigned female at birth because of their medical treatments.
Idaho’s law includes a separate provision that requires athletes to submit to potentially invasive medical tests and physical exams when a girl’s sex is disputed by any person such as an opponent or an observer. Ms. Hecox had also challenged that part of the law.
Two appeals courts have sided with the students and blocked enforcement of the laws.
In the Idaho case, a federal judge said that promoting equal athletic opportunities for men and women was an important government interest, but that categorically barring Ms. Hecox did not advance those goals because of the medical treatment she receives. She is treated with testosterone suppression and estrogen.
In West Virginia, a district court judge, Joseph R. Goodwin, at first upheld the state law. He found that it did not violate the Constitution or Title IX, and concluded that “it is generally accepted that, on average, males outperform females athletically because of inherent physical differences between the sexes.” He added, “I do not see how I could find that the state’s classification based on biological sex is not substantially related to its interest in providing equal athletic opportunities for females.”
But a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said the law could not be enforced against Ms. Pepper-Jackson, specifically, in part because she said medication has prevented her from going through male puberty.
Giving Ms. Pepper-Jackson the option of playing on a boys’ team or not participating in sports, the panel said, “is no real choice at all,” because it would force her to share the field with boys who are “larger, stronger and faster than her because of the elevated levels of circulating testosterone she lacks,” wrote Judge Toby J. Heytens, joined by Judge Pamela A. Harris.
Ann Marimow covers the Supreme Court for The Times from Washington.
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