Supreme Court hears arguments in blockbuster cases challenging transgender sports bans

Arguing on behalf of Becky Pepper-Jackson, the high school sophomore at the center of the second case, is Joshua Block, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who will make his debut at the Supreme Court lectern.

In 2020, Block convinced a federal appeals court to declare unconstitutional a Virginia county’s policy of denying a trans student access to the school bathroom that corresponded with his gender identity. The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals leaned on the decision in that case when it ruled in favor of Pepper-Jackson in 2024.

Block was also involved in the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, according to his official biography, and was part of the ACLU legal team that challenged President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender service members during his first term.

This is not the first time West Virginia’s law barring transgender students from competing on sports teams consistent with their gender identity has come before the Supreme Court.

As the legal challenge against it brought by Becky Pepper-Jackson wound through federal courts, West Virginia asked the justices in 2023 to intervene in the dispute on an emergency basis so the state could keep the then-middle schooler from competing on her school’s cross-country and track teams.

In an unsigned order, the court rejected the state’s request, though it gave no explanation for its decision, as is common when the justices resolve such short fuse appeals.

Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas were the only two justices to publicly note that they would have sided with West Virginia.

Joseph Fons, holding a Pride flag, runs in front of the US Supreme Court building in June 2020.

When the Supreme Court, led by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, ruled in 2020 that federal law protected transgender workers from discrimination, the justices appeared to launch a new era of rights for a historically shunned group.

LGBTQ advocates believed the core principle of Bostock v. Clayton County – that bias against transgender people amounts to unlawful sex discrimination – would extend beyond the workplace.

But the Bostock foundation has proven shaky at the Supreme Court as the majority grew more conservative. At the same time, Republican-controlled states increasingly adopted legislation diminishing transgender rights, in education and public facilities, healthcare and athletics.

“It had great potential as a legal matter and, more broadly, as a political matter,” said Georgetown law professor David Cole, “in recognizing that when we discriminate against people because they are transgender we are, in fact, engaging in sex discrimination and enforcing sex-based stereotypes.”

Cole, a former national legal director of the ACLU who argued on behalf of a transgender woman in the 2020 case, said Bostock’s repercussions have cut in two directions.

Bostock has provided coverage for trans individuals on the job. Yet, Cole, referring to the politicking and legislative efforts against trans rights, said, “The backlash has been brutal.”

Read more about the Supreme Court’s post-Bostock approach.

Justice Samuel Alito asked an attorney for the challenge to Idaho’s law whether female athletes who opposed trans women’s participation in their sports were “bigots.”

“Looking to the broader issue that a lot of people are interested in, there are an awful lot of female athletes who are strongly opposed to participation by trans athletes in competitions with them,” Alito said. “What do you say about them?”

Attorney Kathleen Hartnett, who is representing the transgender woman who brought the lawsuit against Idaho’s statute, said that accusation is not being made in the case. The challenge is not focused on “animus,” Hartnett said, but rather on the law not being an appropriate fit for the perceived issue.

That question from Alito came as part of a series of queries from the conservative justice that zoomed out from the technical, Idaho-specific arguments that have been the focus of the arguments so far.

Alito asked Hartnett to provide a general definition of a man and a woman, under the Constitution’s equal protection clause. He also posed a hypothetical in which a person born as male said they identified as a woman and wanted to play on the girls team, but had not gotten medical treatments to suppress their male hormones or otherwise affirm their female identity.

Hartnett said that in a scenario where a person still has the biological advantages of being a male, a school could ban them from woman’s sports.

“Is that person not a woman, in your understanding?” Alito continued to press. “The person says, ‘I sincerely believe I am woman. I am, in fact, a woman.’ Is that person not a woman?”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that the court cannot look past what he characterized as the “harm” that transgender-inclusive sports policies impose on cisgender women and girl’s sports teams, signaling his sympathy for states that have enacted bans on trans athletes competing on teams that match their gender identity.

“One of the great successes in America over the last 50 years has been the growth of women and girl’s sports. And it’s inspiring,” said Kavanaugh, who for years coached his daughter’s basketball team and emphasized that during his confirmation hearings in 2018.

The conservative justice and occasional swing vote went on to note that states, the NCAA and the US Olympic Committee have all concluded that allowing trans athletes to compete “will create unfairness.”

Michael Williams, Solicitor General for the State of West Virginia, in New York in November 2024.

Defending West Virginia’s law is the state’s solicitor general, Michael Williams, who became the Mountain State’s top lawyer in 2024 and is also arguing for the first time before high court.

“The West Virginia legislature reasonably and rationally defined sex based on biology and acknowledged the physical differences biology creates,” Williams said in his opening, arguing that the law “preserves the enduring structure on which girls’ sports depends.”

Williams, who joined West Virginia’s attorney general’s office in 2021, previously worked in private practice, according to his biography.

Willaims, who received his law degree from George Washington University, clerked for the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals and the US District Courts in Maryland and Maine.

Chief Justice John Roberts pressed the attorney representing Lindsay Hecox, who is challenging Idaho’s ban on transgender athletes playing on teams that align with their gender identity, on the idea that individual transgender athletes should be able to challenge laws that are effectively drawing lines based on sex.

The question, which is the first Roberts has asked, suggested he is skeptical about the transgender athletes’ position.

“I’m just not quite sure I’m grasping why your position isn’t really an effort to apply” a higher level of judicial scrutiny “to a distinction we haven’t applied it to,” Roberts said, referring to trans people.

That question suggested Roberts is concerned about litigation that appeared to be aimed at allowing one transgender athlete to compete that would, in effect, render the law unenforceable. Roberts also seemed concerned that such a ruling could have a broader application beyond sports.

Kathleen Hartnett, an attorney at the Cooley law firm, is representing Lindsay Hecox, the Idaho student who challenged that state’s transgender sports ban.

Hartnett, who is making her Supreme Court debut, spent five years in the Obama administration — working in the Justice Department’s civil division and as an associate counsel to the president.

Hartnett earned her law degree from Harvard and clerked for US Circuit Judge Merrick Garland, who later served as President Joe Biden’s attorney general. She also clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor at one point took a dig at her colleagues for reversing precedent in other recent cases.

“You’re asking the court to adopt views expressed by two minority, dissenting judges … We’ve been doing an awful lot of that lately,” Sotomayor told a Trump administration attorney arguing in favor of Idaho’s trans sports ban. She was referring to earlier sex-discrimination cases decided by the high court.

“You’re smiling because it’s true,” she told Hashim Mooppan, the principal deputy solicitor general.

The conservative-majority court has in recent years overturned several major decades-old cases, most notably in 2022 when it reversed Roe v. Wade, drawing intense criticism from the court’s liberal bloc.

Demonstrators outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on January 13.

Hundreds of peaceful protestors are gathered outside on the Supreme Court today during oral arguments on transgender athletes in sports.

Protestors included a mix of those in support of a transgender athlete ban as well as against it. People in support of transgender rights are gathered alongside American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) employees and volunteers in support of today’s petitioners.

Protestors in support of the ban were carrying signs that read: “protect women’s sports” and “feminists for women sports.”

Shad Turney, a New York resident who traveled to Washington, DC, for the arguments, came to protest in support of the ban on transgender sports.

Others that are against the ban are carrying signs that say “Trans kids belong” and “Trans rights are human rights.”

LGBTQ rights advocates rally outside the US Supreme Court as justices hear arguments in challenges to state bans on transgender girls and women in sports, in Washington, DC, on January 13, 2026.

Donna Powell, a DC resident, was protesting in support of transgender athletes today, and told CNN, “We are all created equal, and transgender people are as well.”

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.

“It is undisputed that states may separate their sports teams based on sex in light of the real biological differences between males and females,” he told the justices.

“States may equally apply that valid sex-based rule to biological males who self-identify as female,” Mooppan added. “Denying a special accommodation to trans-identifying individuals does not discriminate on the basis of sex or gender identity or deny equal protection.”

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.

The Idaho Statehouse in Boise, Idaho, is seen at sunrise in April 2021.

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.

Demonstrators carry transgender flags outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., today as justices hear oral arguments in two cases concerning efforts to enforce Republican-backed state laws banning transgender athletes from female sports teams at public schools.

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.

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.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch attends a luncheon following President Donald Trump's inauguration on January 20, 2025.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Check out the podcast here.

Fifteen year-old Becky Pepper-Jackson.

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.

A view of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on November 5.

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.