By Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON, June 30 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way on Tuesday for states to impose restrictions on transgender student athletes, upholding laws in West Virginia and Idaho banning them from female sports teams — a contentious issue enmeshed in the nation's culture wars.
In a decision lauded by President Donald Trump, the justices overturned rulings by lower courts siding with transgender students who challenged the bans in the two states as violating the U.S. Constitution
and a federal anti-discrimination law. Lawyers for the plaintiffs called the ruling heartbreaking.
The Idaho and West Virginia laws designate sports teams at public schools including universities according to "biological sex" and bar "students of the male sex" from female teams. Twenty-five other states have similar laws on the books.
The court decided 9-0 that the state laws do not violate the Title IX civil rights statute that bars discrimination in education "on the basis of sex."
The justices, however, divided along ideological lines — with the six conservative justices in the majority — in deciding that the measures also do not violate the Constitution's 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law. The three liberal justices said a factual dispute in the West Virginia case should have precluded resolving that issue.
The ruling was authored by conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
"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," Kavanaugh wrote.
The Trump administration, which has cracked down on transgender rights, backed the states in the litigation.
Writing on his Truth Social platform, Trump said after Tuesday's ruling: "BIG WIN: The United States Supreme Court just RULED AGAINST MEN PLAYING IN WOMEN'S SPORTS. Wow! That takes that ridiculous situation off the table!!!"
Idaho and West Virginia said the laws preserve fair and safe competition for women and girls. Critics see the measures as part of a broader assault on the rights of transgender Americans by Trump and various states.
"This is a monumental victory for every female athlete who has ever competed, or dreamed of competing, on a fair and safe playing field," West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey said.
Kristen Waggoner, president of the Alliance Defending Freedom conservative Christian legal group, which helped the states defend their laws, added, "This is a victory for every girl who refused to stay quiet in the face of injustice. Men cannot be women, and no drug erases the male athletic advantage."
'THRIVE AND SUCCEED'
Transgender advocates denounced the ruling as a departure from decades of civil rights progress, and said the effects of the court's action could endanger the safety of transgender people and prevent them from participating in culturally important activities.
Sean Ebony Coleman, CEO of the group Destination Tomorrow, said the ruling serves to "codify transphobic discrimination into law."
"This is a heartbreaking ruling for our clients and transgender girls like them who've asked for nothing more than the same opportunities afforded to their peers," said Joshua Block, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, who helped represent the challengers in each case.
"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. We will continue to advance the fundamental principle that all young people deserve equal opportunity to thrive and succeed," Block said.
'SPORTS ARE DIFFERENT'
"Sports are different from, say, a typical employment or educational opportunity where equal protection often may require that the government generally treat an individual without regard to the individual's sex," Kavanaugh wrote in the decision. "In the sports context, by contrast, everyone agrees that the states may maintain separate women's and men's teams — in other words, that the states may make distinctions based on sex — because of the inherent physical differences between women and men."
Kavanaugh said Title IX was a landmark law that "promoted equal opportunity for female student-athletes and has facilitated the extraordinary growth of women's and girls' sports over the past 54 years."
The term "sex" in the 1972 statute, Kavanaugh said, "cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex."
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, agreed with Kavanaugh that the bans do not violate Title IX.
Kavanaugh also said the state laws did not violate the Equal Protection Clause, a part of the ruling the liberal justices did not join.
Since the laws at issue create sex-based categories, the court's precedents require it to apply heightened judicial review, Kavanaugh said, which can make it harder to defend under 14th Amendment protections. But Kavanaugh said that the bans pass muster because they further the states' substantial interests in "safety and competitive fairness."
MAJOR 2025 RULING
In another major transgender rights ruling, the Supreme Court in a case from Tennessee last year let states ban medical treatments such as puberty blockers and hormones for people under age 18 experiencing gender dysphoria. That term refers to the clinical diagnosis for significant distress that can result from an incongruence between a person's gender identity and sex at birth.
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has backed other restrictions on transgender people, letting Trump ban transgender people from the military and bar passport applicants from selecting the sex reflecting their gender identities for the document.
The court in 2020 delivered a landmark ruling protecting transgender people from workplace discrimination under a federal law called Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that contains wording similar to Title IX. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch authored that ruling.
In a concurring opinion on Tuesday, Gorsuch said that 2020 decision, Bostock v. Clayton County, supports rather than undermines the Supreme Court's decision on how to interpret "sex" in Title IX.
"Put simply, it is a mistake to assume that, just because firing someone in part because of his biological sex amounts to unlawful discrimination in violation of Title VII, sponsoring a single-sex sports team limited to biological women or girls must also amount to unlawful discrimination in violation of Title IX," Gorsuch wrote.
TRUMP'S POLICIES
Trump has taken a hard line on transgender rights since returning to office last year. He has cast the gender identity of transgender people as a lie and issued multiple executive orders to limit their rights including one involving sports participation.
The challenge to West Virginia's law was brought by Becky Pepper-Jackson and her mother Heather Jackson. Pepper-Jackson attends high school in Bridgeport, West Virginia, and participates in shot put and discus.
The Idaho challenge was brought by Lindsay Hecox, a transgender student who previously participated in soccer and running clubs at Boise State University, a public university. Hecox decided to quit playing sports and sought to dismiss the case in part due to a fear of harassment and growing intolerance toward transgender people.
Tuesday was the final day of rulings for the court's current term, which began in October.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Additional reporting by Nate Raymond, Daniel Trotta and Daphne Psaledakis; Editing by Will Dunham)
