At the Supreme Court today
• The nation’s highest court is hearing arguments in a pair of cases challenging state bans on transgender students playing on sports teams that are consistent with their gender identity.
• The court’s three-justice liberal wing peppered Idaho’s solicitor general with questions about how its ban trans sports participation does or doesn’t draw lines based on sex and transgender status. For the most part, the court’s conservative wing has held its fire.
• At issue is whether the state bans are permitted under the 14th Amendment and Title IX, the 1972 federal law that bans discrimination in education on the basis of sex. The laws were challenged by a college student in Idaho and a high school sophomore in West Virginia who competes on the girls’ track team.
• No cameras are allowed in the courtroom. Follow the audio live here.
Former Scalia clerk Hashim Mooppan is arguing for Trump administration
Hashim Mooppan, a veteran attorney who has taken on several high-profile Supreme Court cases at the Justice Department this term, is now speaking on behalf of the Trump administration.
Mooppan, a former clerk to the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, is the principal deputy solicitor general. Prior to joining the Trump administration, he was a partner at the Jones Day law firm and well-known appellate attorney.
This term, Mooppan has already argued a case before the high court involving “conversion therapy” and a major case involving the Voting Rights Act.
Mooppan is the only attorney who will argue in both transgender cases today. The Trump administration is siding with the states and defending the bans on transgender students competing on girls’ sports teams.
More than half of US states have similar laws on their books
Though the nine justices will be scrutinizing the legality of laws passed in Idaho and West Virginia, the fate of similar measures enacted in more than half of the states since 2020 will loom large over Tuesday’s arguments.
After Idaho made history in 2020 as the first state to put a sports ban on its books, efforts by GOP-led statehouses to pass similar measures spread like wildfire across the US in the years that followed. Their popularity on the right was so strong that three statehouses overrode vetoes from their Republican governors to codify the bans.
While the laws passed by more than two dozen states vary slightly from place to place, they all seek to do the same thing: bar transgender women and girls from competing on sports teams that match their gender identity at public primary and secondary schools, as well as state colleges and universities, according to the Movement Advancement Project, which tracks the laws.
The bans were enacted as a wave of other anti-LGBTQ measures were being considered and passed in Republican-controlled states, including restrictions on health care for trans minors and so-called forced outing laws.
Sotomayor questions why court is even hearing Idaho case
Justice Sonia Sotomayor pressed the Idaho solicitor general on why the court was even hearing this case, given that the plaintiff – Lindsay Hecox – has said she does not intend to play collegiate sports in the future.
Hecox, a transgender woman, has attempted to have her case dismissed, noting in part that she had received considerable negative attention because of her involvement.
“There’s no reason to question the sincerity of that belief,” Sotomayor said of Hecox’s submission that she intends to focus on her studies rather than sports.
“Now, every other promise she has made in this litigation…held true until this case and the negative attention that she received,” the liberal justice said.
Alan Hurst, representing Idaho, noted that the court has long been concerned with parties attempting to change their position in the case.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also brought up the mootness issue, noting that Hecox will graduate college in May, likely before the court will deliver its opinion.
Why one of the plaintiffs tried to end her case before it began
Lindsay Hecox, a Boise State University student who is the focus of the first set of arguments, tried to end her case before it even began.
In September, Hecox said she was giving up her effort to compete in athletics and wanted to drop her litigation. Because of that, she argued, her case was moot.
Attorneys for Hecox told the Supreme Court that she had faced “significant challenges that have affected her both personally and academically,” including her father’s death in 2022.
“Ms. Hecox has also come under negative public scrutiny from certain quarters because of this litigation, and she believes that such continued – and likely intensified – attention in the coming school year will distract her from her schoolwork and prevent her from meeting her academic and personal goals,” her attorneys told the Supreme Court.
The filing underscored the difficulty plaintiffs and advocacy groups have experienced in sustaining legal challenges to a wave of laws enacted by states across the country intended to roll back transgender rights.
The Supreme Court deferred Hecox’s request until after the oral arguments.
Key justice to watch: Conservative Neil Gorsuch asks early question
Justice Neil Gorsuch, in his first line of questioning Tuesday, asked an attorney for Idaho whether transgender Americans have a history of discrimination that requires courts to look at policies affecting them with a higher level of scrutiny.
It’s a quick change from last year. When the Supreme Court heard arguments in a major transgender care case, the conservative justice was notably — and unusually — silent.
And when the court handed down its decision in US v. Skrmetti last June, Gorsuch sided with the 6-3 majority in upholding Tennessee’s ban on that care for minors but he did not explain his reasoning in a separate opinion.
That, on its own, would make Gorsuch an especially notable justice to watch today. But it is his majority opinion in a major 2020 decision, Bostock v. Clayton County, that has made him an even more compelling figure. In Bostock, the court ruled that a federal law that bars discrimination “on the basis of sex” in the workplace necessarily protected trans and gay employees as well.
Gorsuch went out of his way to stress that the decision dealt only with employment law. But Title IX, the anti-discrimination law that covers schools, uses nearly identical language and so both the plaintiffs in the trans sports case and the states have understandably spent a good of time debating whether Bostock has any agency in this context.
The answer to that question will likely illuminate what Gorsuch has been thinking about the issue for the past five years — and how he may vote.
Sotomayor to Idaho: "That makes no sense."
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal, is leaning into Idaho Solicitor General Alan Hurst, arguing that the state’s ban on transgender athletes competing on teams that align with their gender identity is necessarily a sex-based classification.
Because of that, Sotomayor is arguing, the law is subject to a higher standard of judicial review under the equal protection clause.
When Hurst argued it was not, Sotomayor shot back: “That makes no sense to me.”
For the early part of the arguments, the court’s liberal wing – Justices Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – are likely to lead the way in questioning the attorneys defending the law.
Idaho Solicitor General Alan Hurst is first up
The first attorney to take the lectern at the Supreme Court is Alan Hurst, Idaho’s top appellate lawyer.
Hurst, who has served as the state’s solicitor general since 2024, clerked for the Utah Supreme Court and the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
A graduate of Brigham Young University and Yale Law School, Hurst is making his debut argument at the Supreme Court.
Hurst also writes an occasional legal column for the Deseret News. He wrote a column in 2024 defending the Supreme Court against critics.
“This conservative Supreme Court is still a court — still looking for the right lines to draw and still defending them against attacks from both sides; still articulating the reasons for its decisions and trying, however imperfectly, to apply them consistently from case to case,” he wrote.
"It’s not actually about fairness": Listen to the latest episode of CNN "One Thing"
Transgender athletes will be watching today’s oral arguments closely – whether they still compete or not.
Hear Mayumi Berry, a transgender woman who ran track and field at the NCAA Division I level before transitioning, discuss what’s at stake for young transgender athletes chasing their athletic dreams.
Transgender athletes at the center of the cases have been winning in lower courts
While the transgender athletes who challenged the Idaho and West Virginia laws are aiming for a major victory at the Supreme Court, their winning streak in lower courts is ultimately what landed their cases before the conservative-majority high court.
In both disputes, a series of favorable rulings from trial-level judges and federal appeals courts concluded that the state bans violated the civil rights of Lindsay Hecox and Becky Pepper-Jackson, who challenged the Idaho and West Virginia laws, respectively.
In the first judicial rebuke of Idaho’s law, a federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump during his first term said it was likely unconstitutional and blocked the state from enforcing it against Hecox.
In ruling against the state, US District Judge David Nye pointed to a “dearth of evidence in the record to show excluding transgender women from women’s sports supports sex equality, provides opportunities for women, or increases access to college scholarships.” A federal appeals court later affirmed Nye’s decision.
A judge in West Virginia initially ruled in favor of Pepper-Jackson, but later, after the case progressed, sided with the state. That decision, however, was reversed in April 2024 by a Richmond-based appeals court, which said the law violated her rights under Title IX, the federal statute that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex at schools that receive federal funding.
“B.P.J. has shown that applying the Act to her would treat her worse than people to whom she is similarly situated, deprive her of any meaningful athletic opportunities, and do so on the basis of sex,” appeals court Judge Toby Heytens wrote in the majority decision.
The states asked the high court in 2024 to review the adverse appeals court decisions and the justices agreed to do so last July.
Supreme Court to hear arguments over transgender sports bans
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today in two blockbuster disputes that will decide the fate of state laws barring transgender girls from playing on women’s sports teams, delving into an especially high-profile fight at the center of the burgeoning legal debate surrounding trans rights.
Those cases have landed on the high court’s docket at a moment of significant political backlash aimed at transgender Americans, a movement that has been led in part by President Donald Trump and Republican-controlled state legislatures.
The first appeal is centered on Lindsay Hecox, who as a freshman at Boise State University challenged Idaho’s 2020 ban on transgender students competing on teams that align with their gender identity. The second involves Becky Pepper-Jackson, a high school sophomore who has successfully challenged West Virginia’s similar law in lower courts.
Two legal questions are at issue. The first is whether the bans violate Title IX, the 1972 federal law that bars discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive federal funding. The second is whether the bans violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Given how the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court has approached transgender issues over the past year, the plaintiffs are likely to face a skeptical bench. After handing down a major decision in favor of LGBTQ rights five years ago, the court has since repeatedly sided against claims brought by transgender Americans.
Twenty-seven states have enacted laws banning transgender students from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity, according to the court records and the Movement Advancement Project.
Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled against trans people
LGBTQ advocates have had a difficult few months at the conservative Supreme Court. Here’s a look at some of those cases:
Transgender care: In June, a 6-3 court let stand a Tennessee law banning transgender care for minors.
Military: In May, the court allowed the Trump administration to enforce a ban on transgender service members in the military. That case was decided on the court’s emergency docket.
Bathrooms: In September, the court went the other way, rejecting a request from South Carolina to enforce a ban on transgender students using school bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
Passports: In November, the court let the Trump administration require US passports to include a traveler’s sex at birth, rather than a person’s gender identity.
Websites: The Supreme Court in 2023 ruled in favor of a Christian web designer in Colorado who refuses to create websites to celebrate same-sex weddings.
Foster care: In 2021, the court sided with a Catholic foster care agency that refused to work with same-sex couples as potential foster parents.
High school girl at center of sports case thinks justices should get to know transgender people
Becky Pepper-Jackson, the 15-year-old high school student at the center of the sports dispute, has a message for the justices of the Supreme Court: Get to know some trans people.
“There’s such a stigma around transgender people that isn’t deserved,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with CNN when asked what she would tell the nine justices who will review her case if she had a chance to speak with them.
Pepper-Jackson began transitioning socially in the third grade and, by the end of the sixth grade, she was taking hormone therapy. Given those treatments, her attorneys stress, she has “never experienced the effects of testosterone on her body” and doesn’t have the inherent biological advantages states like West Virginia and Idaho are attempting to regulate with their laws.
She told CNN that she tries not to think about the legal case when she’s throwing discus and shotput on her school’s track team. But the litigation has been an enormous part of her life for years. Pepper-Jackson and her family sued in 2021, when she was still in middle school.
“It’s definitely forced me to grow up quicker,” she said.
A line outside the Supreme Court formed days before the Tuesday arguments
Over a dozen people were in outside of the Supreme Court on Monday in anticipation of today’s oral arguments.
Many of the people standing in line are saving spaces for people who are hoping end up in the courtroom Tuesday. Some have been camped outside of the court since the weekend.
Linestanders set up lawn chairs, sleeping bags and tarps to claim their spaces and make it more comfortable while they waited.
Seating in the courtroom for members of the public is not guaranteed. It is common for a line to form days in advance of major arguments for people who are interested in attempting to gain access to the courtroom.
Showing up in person is the only way to actually see the justices and advocates in action; the Supreme Court does not allow television cameras or still photography.
Famous athletes line up behind states, students challenging bans
A slew of well-known athletes have rushed to the Supreme Court in recent weeks to press the justices on the impact of having transgender teammates, offering an array of views in two of the most controversial disputes on the high court’s docket.
The long list of figures represented in the friend-of-the-court briefs include household names like Megan Rapinoe, Layshia Clarendon and Sue Bird, who have lined up behind the trans athletes challenging the bans, and Olympic stars Summer Sanders, Donna de Varona and a host of other high-profile athletes expressing support for the states.
Rapinoe, a two-time World Cup champion who has long been critical of such policies, told the court that she became a better athlete and teammate after she was able to come out publicly as gay.
Also supporting the challengers in the pair of cases is Andraya Yearwood, a trans woman whose involvement in school sports in Connecticut put her at the center of early efforts by conservatives to limit such participation.
“The intangible benefits that Ms. Yearwood gained from participating as part of her high school girls’ track team imbued her with confidence and purpose that will serve her well throughout life. Respectfully, Ms. Yearwood asks the court to preserve that opportunity for other transgender girls,” her attorneys wrote in court papers.
On the other side of the field, more than 100 athletes, coaches and parents – including nearly three dozen Olympians – are pressing the court to back the state bans, arguing that they ensure an “equal opportunity” for cisgender women athletes.
“By ruling in favor of West Virginia’s and Idaho’s laws, this court can reaffirm that women should not lose their equal opportunity to compete in sports on a level playing field,” their attorneys told the court.
