The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to take up the hot-button issue of whether transgender girls and women are allowed to participate in sports on girls’ and women’s teams.
The court’s decision to consider the matter sets up the possibility of two big rulings against transgender people two terms in a row, following last month’s 6-3 ruling in the Skrmetti case, in which the Republican-appointed supermajority upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. It takes four justices to grant review of an appeal.
Like the Skrmetti case, the court’s forthcoming decision in the sports-related appeals has national implications. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 27 states have banned transgender youth from playing school sports since 2020.
“Many of these bans allow for invasive forms of sex testing that put all female student athletes at risk and open the door for any school official or adult to question and harass young women,” the ACLU said.
The court agreed to review appeals from West Virginia and Idaho that raise issues under the Constitution’s equal protection clause and federal and state law. The court’s next term begins in October, and the court’s final decisions from the term are expected to be issued by next summer, just as the court finished this term’s decisions last week. So by this time next year, we should know where the court stands on this latest issue.
In the Idaho case, a federal appeals court said a trial court didn’t abuse its discretion in finding the state’s ban likely violates equal protection.
In the West Virginia case, another federal appeals court said the state’s ban can’t be lawfully applied to stop a 13-year-old transgender girl who takes puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since third grade from participating in her school’s cross-country and track teams.
In their petition urging review in the Idaho case, lawyers for the state and the Christian conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom said female athletes “have become bystanders in their own sports as male athletes who identify as female have taken the place of their female competitors — on the field and on the winners’ podium.” They said the appeals court ruling broke with legal precedent and biological reality.
With the high court’s decision to take the appeal, it’s now one of several on the court’s docket so far next term backed by ADF. The justices add appeals to the docket on a rolling basis and typically hear arguments in two-week sessions from October through April. Opposing review in a brief last year, ACLU lawyers, who also represented the transgender side in the Skrmetti case, urged the justices to at least wait to decide what to do with this sports case until Skrmetti was decided. “To the extent that there are unresolved issues in the context of athletics following Skrmetti, there will be plenty of future vehicles for this Court to resolve those issues on a complete record and with further development of the issues in the lower courts,” they wrote to the justices, who nonetheless chose this case as a vehicle. In the West Virginia case, state officials said the appeals court “took on an exceptionally important issue — and got most every step exceptionally wrong.” They asked the justices to “grant review to ensure that women’s sports are preserved and protected.” Opposing review in a brief last year, ACLU lawyers similarly referenced the then-pending Skrmetti case. And like in the Idaho case, they raised procedural reasons not to take the West Virginia case, but the justices nonetheless took this one up as well. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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