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WASHINGTON — Delivering another major blow to LGBTQ rights, the Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state laws that ban transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports.
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The court, largely divided 6-3, ruled against two transgender students, Becky Pepper-Jackson and Lindsay Hecox, who had challenged restrictive laws in West Virginia and Idaho, respectively.
The court in an opinion authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh concluded that the laws do not violate either the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which requires that the law apply evenly to everyone, or Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bars sex discrimination in education.
“The Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women’s and girls’ sports throughout America,” Kavanaugh wrote.
He expressed sympathy for transgender girls and women who desire to play sports, saying “their desire to compete warrants respect” and that they should not be “ostracized or vilified.”
Although the ruling directly concerns only West Virginia and Idaho, it is likely to affect 25 other states with similar bans.
“BIG WIN: The United States Supreme Court just RULED AGAINST MEN PLAYING IN WOMEN’S SPORTS,” President Donald Trump, whose administration supports the bans, said in a Truth Social post.
West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, also welcomed the ruling, saying the state had “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.”
LGBTQ activists decried the ruling, saying that while claiming to ensure fairness, the court was doing the exact opposite.
“By allowing sweeping restrictions on a very small number of transgender students who simply wanted to participate in sports alongside their peers, the ruling creates an unnecessarily unfair playing field,” Sarah Kate Ellis, president of GLAAD, an advocacy group, said in a statement.
“This is a heartbreaking ruling for our clients and transgender girls like them who’ve asked for nothing more than the same opportunities afforded to their peers,” Joshua Block a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the plaintiffs, said in a statement.
It is the latest in a string of defeats for transgender people at the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority.
Last year, the court upheld state laws that ban gender transition treatments for transgender youth. Earlier this year, the court ruled in favor of parents who object to California policies aimed at protecting transgender students. And the court in two decisions last year allowed Trump administration policies that bar transgender people from the military and prevent them from including their gender identity on passports.
The ruling saw the court’s six conservatives in the majority, while the three liberals dissented.
One of the liberals, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, wrote in a dissenting opinion that the court “inflicts a hardship on those it disfavors without giving them the fair and full opportunity the Constitution requires to litigate their contentions.”
Jackson’s case, she added, should have returned to a lower for further litigation.
Among other things, she said that there was not sufficient evidence to show that transgender girls and women had an “inherent physical advantage” across the board, from one sport to another.
In an earlier ruling in 2020 that seems to increasingly appear to be an outlier, the court surprisingly ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal law prohibiting discrimination in employment, applies to gender identity as well as sexual orientation.
Pepper-Jackson, a 16-year-old high school sophomore, has taken puberty-blocking medication and estrogen and competed in girls’ cross-country, shot put and discus.
Hecox, a 25-year-old college student, has received testosterone suppression and estrogen treatments. She tried out for the women’s track and cross-country teams in college without success and has since participated in running and club soccer.
While transgender rights appeared to have some momentum a decade ago, the pendulum has now swung in the opposite direction.
Trump, a staunch opponent of transgender rights, issued an executive order soon after taking office last year called “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.”
The administration opposes state policies that allow transgender athletes to fully participate in girls’ and women’s sports, filing a lawsuit against California on the issue.
The International Olympic Committee announced in March that transgender women could not compete in Olympic female sports categories going forward.
The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee had already imposed new restrictions on transgender athletes.
The West Virginia law, enacted in 2021, says gender is “based solely on the individual’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” As such, it says, a female is a person “whose biological sex determined at birth as female.”
The Idaho law, passed a year earlier, similarly says that sports “designated for females, women, or girls should not be open to students of the male sex.”
Lawrence Hurley is a senior Supreme Court reporter for NBC News.
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