The U.S. Supreme Court took up two cases that could determine whether states can bar transgender athletes from competing on girls’ and women’s sports teams – a decision expected to have nationwide implications.
The case stems from challenges to laws in Idaho and West Virginia that prohibit transgender girls from participating in school sports that don’t align with their birth gender. Lower federal courts blocked the bans, ruling they likely violated Title IX and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
The original plaintiffs in both these cases, one a transgender teen who has never gone through male puberty and the other a transgender woman on hormone therapy, have documentation showing they do not have a physiological advantage over other female athletes. Contrary to what the public believes, neither state is overrun with transgender athletes.
“Our hope is certainly that we prevail,” said Joshua Block, who as senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Projects will argue in the West Virginia case.
“But we also hope that, regardless of what happens, this case isn’t successfully used as a tool to undermine the rights of transgender folks more generally. In areas far beyond athletics,” Block added.
Transgender or gender fluid people have been around for centuries according to historians and gender studies experts, as the continuous growth and support towards the community reached new heights in the last two decades, but with Trump’s executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” progress for the transgender community have been on a downward spiral.
The Trump Administration’s executive order (EO) utilizes Title IX as justification for barring transgender athletes. In depth, the executive order, also known as EO 14201, “is a policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy,” the order states in part. It went into effect on Feb. 6, 2025. In short, the goal of the policy is “to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.”
The day after the EO, the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) updated its participation policy to limit eligibility of student athlete’s assigned male at birth to compete in women’s competitions to “student-athletes assigned female at birth.” Yet, under section 2 of the same policy, it also states that it allows “a student-athlete assigned male at birth to practice on the team consistent with their gender identity and receive all other benefits” such as medical care.
While many in favor of the ban suggested that transgender athletes create their own league, only one percent of the American population identifies as transgender, which makes the alternative hard to accomplish.
“While better data are needed to understand the number of transgender student-athletes participating in the complex network of collegiate sports opportunities, anecdotal estimates remain very low,” the UCLA Williams Institute report stated. “It is unlikely that transgender athletes make up more than 1.3 percent of the overall college athlete population.”
