Supreme Court Upholds Transgender Sports Bans in 6–3 Ruling

By Lisa Keen, Keen News Service
Updated June 30, 2026 12:42 PM

The U.S. Supreme Court today (June 30) ruled 6 to 3 that states may ban transgender females from participating in sports competitions for females at schools which receive federal funding.

While the court’s three most liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — agreed with the majority that the bans do not violate Title IX, they dissented from the majority’s holding on the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

The result was widely predicted following the oral arguments in January. The decision emerged out of appeals from two states — Idaho and West Virginia — but will clear the way for enforcement of existing bans in 27 other states with similar bans. Nearly all secondary schools, colleges, and universities receive federal funding for various purposes.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote the decision consolidating two appeals, said one could not “plausibly” interpret Title IX, a federal law that bans discrimination based on sex in educational programs, to be anything other than “biological sex.”

“The ordinary meaning of the term ‘sex’ at the time of enactment in the early 1970s was biological sex and not gender identity, particularly in the sports context,” wrote Kavanaugh. Title IX does not say “schools must allow certain biological males to participate in women’s and girls’ sports. Nor do the statute or regulations say that schools must make an exception for those biological males who identify as female and have taken puberty blockers or hormones.”

Legal activists with the ACLU and Lambda Legal said they are very disappointed in the decision but believe it is a narrow one, leaving much to be decided when the questions are in contexts other than sports. The ACLU’s Joshua Block said the organizations would continue to “push back against attempts to erase trans people from public life.” Sasha Buchert of Lambda said she was “profoundly disappointed” that the court did not address the fact that the teenaged plaintiff in the West Virginia case had taken puberty blockers at a young age and did not pose a safety threat to other female players. They noted that, while the decision leaves state bans against trans female athletes in place, it does not require other states to adopt such bans.

Jennifer Levi of GLAD Law said “this ruling is not the end of the story.”

“Many states have developed thoughtful, evidence-based policies that treat students as individual athletes – and those remain in place,” said Levi in a press statement. “When a law bars every transgender girl regardless of age, hormones, or physiology, it isn’t about competitive fairness. It’s about keeping transgender kids out. We can protect women’s sports without doing that. Most of the country already does.”

In reaching the opinion, the court had to deal with its 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County. That decision, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch for a 6 to 3 majority, said a federal law (Title VII) barring discrimination on the basis of “sex” in employment also prohibits discrimination based on “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” Kavanaugh stated simply that employment and sports are “vastly different.”

The court ruled that the state bans on trans females in female sports do not violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, because, Kavanaugh wrote, the government has an important interest in ensuring the “safety and competitive fairness” of women’s sports. The decision also said that it does not matter whether some trans females take puberty blockers early in life.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, said she agreed that the Title IX claim fails, but that the majority is wrong on its equal protection analysis because unresolved factual questions prevent the Court from assessing the merits of a teen athlete who took puberty blockers at a young age. At this time, wrote Sotomayor, the Court should allow the District Court to address those factual questions.

“Yet in an opinion unencumbered by fact or law,” said Sotomayor, “the majority today cuts off that process prematurely, deciding instead that [B.P.J.’s] case must end now.”

“This litigation implicates deeply sensitive, contentious, and evolving issues,” wrote Sotomayor. “These circumstances demand exercising judicial restraint, not rushing to answer conclusively difficult questions without sufficient evidentiary development…. Because the majority, however, inflicts a hardship on those it disfavors without giving them the fair and full opportunity the Constitution requires to litigate their contentions, I respectfully dissent.”

Justice Jackson, in an additional opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, said the holding in Bostock –that on the basis of sex includes discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity– “plainly applies to Title IX.”

“Title IX makes room for individuals to live in the gender they choose; it cares not just about sex assigned at birth but also about individuals’ ability to match (or not) their gender presentation to their gender identity,” wrote Jackson. “Because West Virginia’s law forces [the teen] to live—in this case, to play—as a boy though she is a girl, it might well run afoul of Title IX….”

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett joined Kavanaugh’s opinion in full. Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion to explain why his opinion in Bostock –that “on the basis of sex” includes discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity– comports with a decision that says it does not in this context.

“The Court understands the term ‘sex’ in Title IX to mean biological sex, just as we understood that term in Title VII in Bostock,” wrote Gorsuch. “…The difference between this case and Bostock is that we face here a question that wasn’t present there. In Bostock, again, no one doubted that firing someone because of his biological sex qualified as ‘discrimination’ under Title VII. Here, though, we face the question whether it qualifies as discrimination under Title IX for a federal funding recipient to sponsor sports teams restricted to biological women or girls alone. And for the reasons just laid out above and explored in depth by the Court, it does not. Title IX anticipates and approves single-sex living accommodations and sports teams in school settings; it does not treat them as unlawful discrimination.”

Justice Thomas was more blunt and dismissive of the trans female athletes.

“A man does not have a legal right to compete against women just because he believes that he is a woman,” wrote Thomas. “…Because ‘gender dysphoria’ is a mutable mental state that is the object of psychiatric treatment, it does not resemble the immutable characteristics on the basis of which our precedents have applied heightened scrutiny—race, sex, or national origin. Instead,” added Thomas, “gender dysphoria resembles other characteristics on the basis of which legislatures may classify with a merely rational basis.”

“Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are,” wrote Thomas. “Sex is an immutable ‘biological’ characteristic; it is binary; and ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ ‘boy’ and ‘girl,’ are the terms that correspond to adults and children of each sex.”

The Supreme Court consolidated two cases involving a transgender female athlete, even though one fact in their cases was starkly different. Becky Pepper-Jackson, 15, who challenged the West Virginia law, has taken puberty-blocking medication since around the third grade and has received hormone therapy with estrogen. Thus, her attorneys argued, she does not have any biological advantage over cisgender female athletes. Lindsay Hecox, who challenged the law in Idaho, underwent male puberty and did not begin taking drugs to suppress testosterone until college. The state of Idaho passed a blanket ban against trans-female athletes in school just as Hecox was preparing to try out for her school’s track-and-field and cross-country teams.

Both athletes argued that the bans violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law and Title IX of the federal Education Amendments Act. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, a state must justify treating two people differently under the law. Under Title IX, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance….” Nearly all secondary schools and about 90 percent of colleges and universities receive federal funding for various purposes.

Both the Fourth and Ninth circuit U.S. Courts of Appeals ruled against the state bans, and both West Virginia (in West Virginia v. BPJ) and Idaho (in Little v. Hecox) appealed to the Supreme Court.

During oral argument in January, several justices said they considered the record unclear or underdeveloped. They did not think Congress had clearly defined the word “sex” in 1972 when it passed Title IX.

In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court held, in Bostock v. Clayton County, that “on the basis of sex” in Title VII (barring discrimination based on sex in the workplace), includes prohibition of discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

In February 2025, President Trump signed an executive order saying federal funds would be rescinded from any federally funded educational program that “results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls” in sports “and deprives them of privacy.” And the Department of Justice under Trump argued in favor of the state bans on trans females playing in female sports.

The West Virginia and Idaho appeals (West Virginia v. BPJ and Little v. Hecox) were two of the last four decisions released in the Supreme Court’s 2025-26 session.

They were also two of three transgender related appeals this session –decisions considered as among 12 “major cases” by scotusblog.com. In Chiles v. Salazar, decided in March, an 8 to 1 majority of the Supreme Court ruled that Colorado could not enforce its ban on so-called “conversion therapy” against a counselor’s talk therapy aimed at changing a client’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The court said the Colorado law regulated speech based on viewpoint, violating the therapist’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech, and sent the case back to the lower courts.

The good news of the session, from the LGBTQ perspective, included three appeals involving attempts by parents to insist schools report to parents any information they have about a student’s exploration of sexual orientation or gender identity. The court declined to take up those cases.

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