Conservative The Supreme Court judges appeared on Tuesday sympathizes with arguments that states can ban transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams.
The justices heard more than three hours of arguments from Idaho and West Virginia, as well as a Trump administration lawyer, who defended laws banning transgender athletes. The two cases heard back-to-back Tuesday — Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ — were first filed by a transgender student and a high school student, respectively, who alleged that these laws violated their rights to equal protection under the Constitution and federal anti-discrimination law.
But the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority in both cases appeared ready to accept the states’ arguments that transgender identity is not equal to sex, and therefore the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment does not apply.
During the first case heard in the back-to-back session, Little v. Hecox, both conservative and liberal justices raised questions — including questions about the level of scrutiny to be applied to anti-trans bans and whether the case itself was still valid.
But it was during the second case, West Virginia v. BPJ, that the conservative justices seemed to lean toward allowing state-level bans, focusing on how to balance transgender status and sex in terms of anti-discrimination law.
This case comes from Becky Pepper-Jackson, now 15, who sued the state three years ago when she was banned from trying out for the girls’ track team, despite being prescribed medication that kept her from ever experiencing male puberty. Pepper-Jackson’s family argued, and the lower courts agreed, that the state law violated her right to equal protection and Title IX.
The judges waded through a variety of hypothetical questions about the differences between boys and girls in everything from math to chess. But Judge Amy Coney Barrett seemed keen not to fall into “comparably situated” arguments.
“I think it opens up a huge can of worms that maybe we don’t need to dig into here,” she said.
Other conservative justices, however, have pressed lawyers on broader questions about the definition of “sex.”
Speaking on behalf of the Trump administration for Idaho and West Virginia, Hashim Mooppan said it doesn’t matter if an athlete’s testosterone levels are suppressed, as is the case with both Hecox and Pepper-Jackson, because no amount of hormonal therapy can change their “gender,” as West Virginia defines it. Under West Virginia statute, “biological sex” is based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.
Joshua Block, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union representing Pepper-Jackson, said Title IX, which Congress passed in 1972, prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex and did so without defining it. He urged the Court not to decide this case based on West Virginia’s definition of sex.
“I think that’s the goal [of Title IX] is to ensure that sex is not used to discriminate by denying opportunities. Our argument is that there is a group of people who are assigned male at birth and for whom placement on the boys’ team is an embarrassment. [harmful]and there is a word for those people: transgender girls.”
Block said he would accept some kind of loss at the Supreme Court, which would still allow the case to proceed through lower courts, which it has largely governed in favor of the transgender plaintiffs.
Lawyers for plaintiffs in the morning’s first case were also hoping for a pretrial detention decision from the judges. At the center of the case is Lindsay Hecox, a senior at Boise State University who filed a lawsuit over Idaho’s 2020 law banning transgender girls and women from playing women’s sports. She argued that the law violated her right to equal protection under the Constitution, and ultimately won her case in the lower courts. In September 2025, Hecox argued that her case is moot because she no longer plays or plans to play college or team sports in the state.
Judges Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson pushed back on that line of thinking, highlighting the negative attention the plaintiff has received for being part of the lawsuit. If the justices don’t choose to dismiss the case as moot, they argued, they would force “an unwilling plaintiff” to remain part of a high-profile lawsuit. Such a decision could be a way out for the court: if the judges decide that the case is moot, there would be no reason for them to rule on it, and the case would likely go back to the lower courts for further legal proceedings.
Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch asked Alan Hurst, Idaho’s attorney general, whether transgender people should be considered a legally protected class in this case — an important and still unanswered question that comes up in almost every case involving transgender rights. Gorsuch authored a landmark 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County that protected transgender employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Hurst did not respond fully to Gorsuch’s inquiry, but said the court should consider the precedent set by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the definition of sex includes gender identity.
Another conservative justice, Amy Coney Barrett, raised questions about the implications of Idaho’s anti-trans sports law, wondering whether the law would, for example, exclude six-year-olds from sports teams that match their gender identity. Hurst claimed without evidence that young boys at that age have an inherent athletic advantage, and therefore the law could apply to children that age.
Mooppan, the Trump administration lawyer, argued that the state law is legitimate because so few trans women participate in sports. His statement is a bit ironic, considering that President Donald Trump has partially rolled back transgender rights by focusing an inordinate amount of money on this low number of trans athletes. There are about 550,000 college athletes in the country, and only about 10 of them are transgender, says the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. told Congress December 2024.
Idaho justifies its law by arguing that it is necessary to protect women from people with so-called “biological advantages.”
Kathleen Harnett, Hecox’s attorney, said this distinction does not apply to her client, who has a physiology similar to that of any cisgender woman after undergoing more than a year of testosterone suppression and estrogen therapy.
Harnett noted that there are few examples of trans athletes in girls’ and women’s sports who have “participated and excelled.”
In both cases, the justices also seemed interested in whether a state could impose its rules allowing or banning trans athletes on another state. Currently, 27 states have restrictions on trans athletes.
“You are litigating this case the other way around under states that do not ban trans women and girls from participating in sports teams. Is that correct?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Mooppan at one point during arguments in BPJ: “You said, and I appreciate this, that we should not answer that question. Are there any arguments that suggest what the answer to that question is?” In response, Mooppan returned to the question of how sex should be defined in the context of transgender status.
Hecox and Pepper-Jackson are the only high-profile athletes in their states who would be subject to the laws affecting trans athletes.
“What’s notable today is that the Court recognizes that these extreme bans harm transgender children and raise fairness concerns. As multiple federal courts have previously recognized, transgender student athletes like BPJ and Lindsay Hecox may not have a competitive advantage due to medical treatment or other reasons,” Shannon Minter, an attorney for the National Center for LGBTQ rights, said in a statement after oral arguments. “The Constitution does not allow states to impose blanket exclusions that ignore reality and override individual circumstances.”
At a rally outside the court this morning, hundreds of people showed up with signals and strong feelings from both sides about trans athletes’ participation in women’s sports.
Ashley, who spoke to HuffPost and gave only her first name, said she flew in from Portland, Oregon, to represent her 7-year-old transgender child.
“I felt helpless, and this is something I could do,” she said, holding a sign with a message from her child. The handmade sign read: “Trans girls in sports rule! Exclusion drools!”
Across the barrier, a woman who declined to give her name said she flew from Arizona to demonstrate her opposition to trans girls playing girls’ sports. She said the issue was about “protecting women” because “they can be harmed by competing with men.”
When HuffPost asked if she meant that trans men are not as strong as cisgender men and could get hurt competing against them in sports, she couldn’t answer if that was her point.
The arrival of these cases on the Supreme Court’s docket is the culmination of five years of mounting anti-LGBTQ+ legislation led by right-wing lawmakers and activists.
In 2019, the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group, defended several cisgender athletes who opposed Connecticut’s inclusive sports policies. From there, the group helped draft dozens of anti-trans sports bans, including for West Virginia. The ADF attorneys now represent both West Virginia and Idaho.
These cases could not only have broad implications for the fate of other bans across the country, but also raise other legal questions around privacy, sex discrimination and how transgender people are treated more broadly under the law, advocates argue. told HuffPost.
The Trump administration has targeted transgender people since returning to office last year, including threatening to withhold federal funding from schools with trans-inclusive athletics policies, expelling transgender people from the military and banning transgender people from updating their passports with the correct gender marker.
Jennifer Bendery contributed to this report.
