The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams. The ruling on a pair of separate cases from Idaho and West Virginia could carry far-reaching implications for transgender rights. The court’s conservative majority ruled 6 -3 that the laws did not violate the Constitution, while the justices agreed unanimously that barring transgender girls and women did not run afoul of the landmark Title IX law. It prohibits discrimination in education and has produced dramatic growth in girls and women’s sports. President Donald Trump, who made his opposition to transgender athletes a key feature of his speeches, embraced the Supreme Court decision. “BIG WIN,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Wow! That takes that ridiculous situation off the table!!!” In the first case, Lindsay Hecox, 25, sued over Idaho’s first-in-the-nation ban for the chance to try out for the women’s track and cross-country teams at Boise State University in Idaho. She didn’t make either squad because “she was too slow,” her lawyer, Kathleen Hartnett, told the court during oral arguments, but she competed in club-level soccer and running. The second case centers around a 2021 West Virginia law that also bans trans athletes from participating on women’s and girls’ sports teams. Becky Pepper-Jackson, now a 15-year-old high school sophomore, wanted to join her middle school girls’ cross country team in 2021 and sued her state over the law. An appeals court granted a preliminary injunction barring the state from enforcing the ban that allowed her to try out for middle school sports. Pepper-Jackson has progressed from a back-of-the-pack cross-country runner in middle school to a statewide third-place finish in the discus in just her first year of high school. Pepper-Jackson transitioned in third grade, publicly identified as a girl since age 8, and began taking puberty-blocking medication at the onset of her puberty. She’s also been issued a West Virginia birth certificate recognizing her as female. Pepper-Jackson is the only transgender person who has sought to compete in girls sports in West Virginia. Justice Brett Kavanbaugh wrote for the court that, “states may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females.” West Virginia and Idaho’s female sports teams did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, his opinion says. “The States argue — and the Court agrees — that the interests of safety and competitive fairness are important interests for purposes of equal protection analysis,” he wrote. West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, applauded the Supreme Court’s decision, calling it “one of the most important victories for women’s athletics since the enactment of Title IX itself.” He added, “Future generations of female athletes will benefit from the certainty, fairness and opportunity this decision protects.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the three liberal justices, argued that Pepper-Jackson should have been permitted a constitutional challenge to the ban. “To be clear, B.P.J. ultimately may not be able to show that the science is sufficiently on her side; this dissent takes no position one way or another on B.P.J.’s odds of success,” she wrote, using Pepper-Jackson’s initials. “In other words, West Virginia might be right that transgender girls retain some inherent athletic advantage over cisgender girls due to their sex identified at birth even after receiving the hormonal therapy B.P.J. identifies.” But the courts had not made “the necessary factual findings about the state of the scientific debate,” she wrote. Advocates for LGBTQ+ youth condemn the ruling, while the American Civil Liberties Union senior lawyer Joshua Block called it “heartbreaking.”  “The reality is that the equality of transgender women and girls takes nothing away from, and in fact promotes, the equality of all women and girls,” Block said in a statement. “We will continue to advance the fundamental principle that all young people deserve equal opportunity to thrive and succeed.” Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women’s sports after President Donald Trump, a Republican, signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation. About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. ...read more read less