WASHINGTON – In 2022, Lia Thomas won the women’s 500-yard freestyle at the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships. The victory, the first Division I title for a transgender athlete, sparked a national debate.
Four years later, the Supreme Court agreed with states that have sought to bar athletes born male from competing against girls and women. The ruling Tuesday was 6-3.
“Separate sports teams for biological males and biological females are reasonable,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the conservative majority. “Given the inherent physical differences between the sexes, allowing only biological females to play on women’s and girls’ teams can reduce the risk of physical injury and ensure fair competition.”
The court heard more than three-and-a-half hours of oral arguments in January on the issue, in a pair of cases from Idaho and West Virginia involving transgender athletes’ participation in sports.
The ruling has implications nationwide.
Arizona is one of 27 states with laws intended to block transgender athletes from participating in sports, under the Save Women’s Sports Act signed by former Gov. Doug Ducey in 2022.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing a dissenting opinion for the three liberal justices, chastised the majority for allowing states to bar all transgender athletes without exception, “even if the facts show that they do not” as individual enjoy an athletic advantage.
“The ban is absolute,” she added, meaning that a transgender athlete “cannot practice on girls’ teams, even if she would not take anyone’s spot in an eventual competition, even if everyone who tries out for the team makes it, and even if having the chance to participate could aid immensely in treating (that child’s) gender dysphoria.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the ruling a “tremendous victory,” saying it “affirms the common sense right of states to prohibit men from competing in women’s sports, safeguard the integrity of female spaces, and ensure no woman faces discrimination on the basis of sex.”
Advocates for transgender athletes had feared this outcome.
“Transgender girls just want to play school sports with their friends and we all know what it feels like to be excluded from something growing up,” said Rachel Berg, senior staff attorney for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights.
The center represents a transgender girl identified in court as Jane Doe in Doe v. Horne, a lawsuit against the Arizona Interscholastic Association, which sought to enforce the 2022 law barring her from competition.
Doe runs cross-country and track and plays soccer and flag football.
At age 7, she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria. In 2023, at age 11, she started taking the puberty-blocking medication Supprelin. Lower courts found that the treatment meant Doe would not experience a rise in testosterone levels and would therefore have no physiological advantages over female competitors.
In July 2023, a federal court in Arizona issued an injunction blocking the enforcement of the Arizona law and allowing Doe to continue participating in sports. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which handles cases in nine Western states, including Arizona and Idaho, upheld the injunction in September 2024.
The Supreme Court’s ruling opens the way for enforcement of the law Ducey signed, banning transgender athletes from playing sports in Arizona.
“The two States here – along with 25 other States, the IOC, the USOPC, and the NCAA – have concluded at this time that women and girls should be allowed to compete … on an equal playing field, without fear of physical injury from biological males or being forced to compete against biological males,” Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion.
“Consistent with Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, we hold that the States may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females. They may determine eligibility for women’s and girls’ sports based on biological sex. The Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women’s and girls’ sports throughout America,” he wrote.
Two weeks into his second term, President Donald Trump ordered McMahon to use Title IX – a provision of a 1972 law that bans sex discrimination in federally funded education programs – to crack down on schools that allow transgender girls and women to participate in girls’ sports.
The Arizona Interscholastic Association, citing the Trump executive order, has used Title IX to ban transgender athletes from competition. Under the 2023 appeals court injunction, Doe and another plaintiff, known in court filings as Megan Roe, are allowed to compete in Arizona.
“These laws are part of the pattern and are part of the strategy and desire of those on the right to essentially deny the existence of – and erase from public life – transgender individuals,” said Scott McCoy, deputy legal director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, and a former Utah state senator, the first openly gay man elected to that post.
Groups that want to ban transgender athletes from competition assert that regardless of treatment, biological sex doesn’t change and people born male have an unfair advantage over girls on the playing field.
“The science and common sense shows us testosterone suppression does not erase the advantages that males have over females,” said Suzanne Beecher, legal counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom. “That’s the reason that we have separate categories in sports in the first place.”
In the West Virginia case, a student named Becky Pepper Jackson, known as BPJ in court filings, started taking puberty blockers in 2020 before she started middle school.
BPJ recently took first place in girls shot put at the state championship, throwing more than 2 feet farther than the runner-up.
“This just illustrates the very real advantages that males have over females and the real harms that come when we deny this biological reality,” Beecher said.
One year ago, the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law banning the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy in a 6-3 ruling. The text of the law says the ban “encourages minors to appreciate their sex, particularly as they go through puberty.”
In the ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected assertions that such a ban “enforces a government preference that people conform to expectations about their sex.”
Advocates for transgender athletes call efforts to exclude these athletes narrow-minded.
“It takes a lot of guts to put yourself in front of the public like that,” said Val Pizzo, a rugby player for the Baltimore Flamingos Rugby Football Club, Maryland’s first LGBTQ rugby team. “But if you can achieve more inclusion for trans athletes, it makes such a huge difference in the lives of a lot of people.”
The debate over transgender athletes has been highly charged, though it involves a small fraction of students.
“In the public testimony before the Arizona Legislature, the AIA testified that only between 10 to 15 transgender people – boys or girls – had played school sports in Arizona in the last decade,” Berg said. “So of all the 100,000-plus school athletes in Arizona, we’re talking about maybe one a year at most.”
One of Trump’s second-term campaign priorities was to reverse Biden-era Title IX policies at the Department of Education. The Trump order narrows enforcement to discrimination based on sex but not gender identity.
In a June 23 letter to McMahon, three dozen members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus in the House, including Tucson Rep. Adelita Grijalva, said they were “outraged” at the way her department’s Office of Civil Rights has wielded Title IX.
OCR has not settled a single case of sexual harassment or sexual violence during McMahon’s tenure, they noted, even as it used the provision to undermine the rights of transgender athletes.
“Your failure to enforce Title IX protections for millions of women and girls is deliberate and indefensible,” the lawmakers wrote. “We urge you to cease baseless investigations and demonstrate immediate progress in effectively resolving all pending OCR cases to deliver real enforceable legal protection for students facing discrimination based on their sex.”
Under pressure from the Trump administration, including threats to cut federal research funding, Thomas’ university, the University of Pennsylvania, agreed to remove her records and apologize to female athletes she had competed against.
The two cases before the Supreme Court – Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. – challenged state restrictions on the grounds that transgender athletes have protection under Title IX and the 14th Amendment.
Berg asserted that the 9th Circuit got it right: “A blanket ban on transgender girls playing school sports … regardless of their medical history, regardless of their age, regardless of the sport that they’re playing, regardless of any other factors” would violate those athletes’ Equal Protection rights.
“The state has not provided any reason that’s rational to exclude these girls from girls’ teams,” she said.
The Idaho case involved a track and field athlete named Lindsay Hecox, now 24, who wanted to compete at Boise State University. State officials didn’t want her to compete, and in 2020, the Legislature enacted the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, a ban on transgender athletes competing under anything but their gender at birth. Gov. Brad Little, a Republican, signed it.
A federal court blocked enforcement, and the 9th Circuit upheld the lower court.
Hecox began testosterone suppression and estrogen treatments in her first year at Boise State.
House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg, R-Mich., lauded the ruling, saying the justices “stood up for fairness, common sense, and the integrity of women’s sports.”
“Women’s sports are for women. Unfortunately, radical gender ideology bolstered by policies pushed under the Biden-Harris administration chipped away at Title IX protections,” he said.
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