Supreme Court lets states ban transgender athletes from playing on girls sports teams

The court’s three liberal justices partially dissented from the court’s decision on Tuesday, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing in a stinging opinion that the majority had wrongly decided that trans student athletes cannot bring constitutional challenges against the state bans.

The liberals agreed with the court’s holding that a federal law barring sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funding does not prohibit such bans. But, Sotomayor wrote for herself and her colleagues, the majority “inflicts a hardship on those it disfavors without giving them the fair and full opportunity the Constitution requires to litigate their contentions.”

“One can only hope that the same misguided approach does not and will not extend to other contexts tomorrow,” she wrote in part.

Underscoring her displeasure with the court’s ruling, Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal member, took the rare step of reading portions of her dissent from the bench on Tuesday.

Read the Supreme Court’s full ruling below allowing states to ban transgender athletes from playing on girls sports teams.

Protesters wave transgender pride flags outside the Supreme Court as it hears arguments over state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams in January in Washington, DC.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that states may bar transgender students from playing on girls sports teams, delivering the latest in a series of legal defeats to trans Americans amid a political backlash in conservative states that has accelerated at a dramatic pace in recent years.

The court was 6-3 along ideological lines on the issue of whether the Constitution bars the states from banning transgender sports. However, the court’s liberals were in the majority on a separate question of whether the state bans were barred by a federal law.

The decision in the court’s most closely watched culture war dispute of the term means that laws in more than half of US states that are similar to those enacted in West Virginia and Idaho will also likely stand. The conservative states say the laws are intended to ensure biological female athletes can compete on an even playing field.

The ruling was a major defeat for the LGBTQ movement at the conservative Supreme Court, and it came a year after the justices allowed states to ban transgender care for minors, such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Since then, the court has permitted President Donald Trump to ban transgender Americans from serving in the military and allowed the administration to require sex-at-birth markers on US passports.

While the case dealt with laws in two states, the court’s decision will have implications for more than half the nation. Some 27 states have enacted laws similar to those on the books in West Virginia and Idaho, with officials there arguing the laws promote both safety and fairness for cisgender girls.

“The legislatures and the schools are better equipped — and under the Constitution, are the more appropriate entities — to assess the competing medical and scientific considerations and draw appropriate lines,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his majority opinion.

People hold rainbow-colored umbrellas and flags at a demonstration as the US Supreme Court hears arguments over an appeal by President Joe Biden's administration of a lower court's decision upholding a Republican-backed ban in Tennessee on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, outside the court in Washington, DC, on December 4, 2024.

The decision on trans sports bans comes at a moment of immense political and legal backlash aimed at transgender Americans.

And the Supreme Court has been highly skeptical of efforts to shield LGBTQ people from that blowback.

In May 2025, the justices allowed the Trump administration to enforce a ban on transgender service members in the military. In June 2025, the court let stand state laws that bar transgender care for minors. Nearly five months later, a majority of justices let the administration require US passports to include a traveler’s sex at birth, rather than a person’s gender identity.

Following through on promises he made during his campaign, Trump signed an executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” and earlier this year his administration sued Minnesota in an effort to stymie permissive sports policies there. The impact of the executive order has stretched beyond the US’ borders. In March, the International Olympic Committee banned transgender women from competing on women’s events, a move that was intended to bring the organization’s policies in line with Trump’s ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Games.

The last time the court sided with LGBTQ advocates in a merits decision was in 2020. In Bostock v. Clayton County, the court ruled that a workplace anti-discrimination law applied to gay and transgender employees.

Advocates sought to apply the logic underpinning that decision to countless other cases challenging anti-LGBTQ laws and policies, including ones over sports bans, but found mixed success in lower courts. For its part, the Supreme Court has yet to use that 2020 case to back such challenges.

This courtroom sketch shows US Solicitor General D. John Sauer and President Donald Trump during oral arguments over Trump’s executive order that attempts to end automatic birthright citizenship at the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on April 1.

Trump, who made history by attending the oral arguments in the case on April 1, faced a highly skeptical bench, including from the three justices he named during his first term. It was clear, based on those arguments, that most of the court had both legal and practical concerns with how the administration’s order would be carried out.

In one especially fatal line of questioning from a Trump appointee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that even some freed slaves whose children were the reason for the 14th Amendment might not have been covered if Trump’s reasoning was in force at the time. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, also Trump nominees, suggested the case could be decided without even reaching the constitutional questions.

Several of the justices, including Barrett and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, questioned the practicalities of Trump’s order. Over the next 50 years, an average of roughly 255,000 children born in the US every year would start life without US citizenship based on their parents’ status, according to an estimate from the Migration Policy Institute. Largely lost in the fervor over “birth tourism” was the reality that the order would have also required US citizen parents to document their own immigration status in order to secure citizenship for their child.

“Are you suggesting that when a baby is born, people have to have documents, present documents? Is this happening in the delivery room? How are we determining when or whether a newborn child is a citizen of the United States under your rule?” Jackson asked US Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who was representing the Trump administration.

Watch what CNN’s Paula Reid reported after the arguments:

Video Ad Feedback

Trump's presence does not sway justices on birthright citizenship

President Trump attended Supreme Court oral arguments, but his presence did little to influence the justices as they considered limits on birthright citizenship. CNN’s Paula Reid reports.

1:41 • Source: CNN

Trump's presence does not sway justices on birthright citizenship

1:41

In one sense, the case was a win for the Trump administration before the court even finished the final draft of its opinion.

A decade ago, the notion that a president could unilaterally reimagine how the nation has understood birthright citizenship since the mid-19th century was widely viewed as a fringe theory. Underscoring his penchant for pushing the edges of the law, Trump managed to get a serious hearing on the issue at the nation’s highest court less than halfway through his second term.

By the end of the case, many Republicans — including members of Congress, state officials and seasoned legal scholars — supported Trump’s position.

And it was technically the second time the order had made its way to the justices. Last year, in a separate challenge to Trump’s birthright citizenship policy, the Supreme Court limited the ability of lower courts to pause presidential policies on a nationwide basis. Based on that decision, immigrant advocacy groups switched legal tactics and managed to get the president’s order blocked again, just days after the high court’s ruling technically allowed it to go forward.

On the other hand, Trump’s policy was never implemented, and every lower court to consider its merits ruled against it.

Becky Pepper-Jackson attends the Lambda Legal Liberty Awards National Dinner in New York, on June 4, 2026.

Becky Pepper-Jackson, the trans girl who challenged West Virginia’s sports ban, always figured her case was likely a long shot.

“Someone has to do this because this is just a terrible thing,” Pepper-Jackson told CNN in an interview with her family and attorneys before the oral arguments in the case. “I know that I can handle it and it’s never crossed my mind to stop, because I know I’m doing it for everybody.”

Pepper-Jackson, a high school sophomore when the case was argued before the Supreme Court, has for years enjoyed competing in track — shot put, specifically. Speaking with CNN, she flashed a smile when asked to describe the basic technique of the shot put.

“It’s just throwing something that’s heavy,” she said. “Far.”

That description, she knew, could also apply to her blockbuster legal case.

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 are attempting to regulate.

While competitive and proud of her personal records, Pepper-Jackson didn’t come across as a teen driven to win her at weekend track meets at any cost. She joked that she found her way to shot put and discus only because she “sucked at running.”

She likes to play sports, she said, because of her friends and “life skills that you won’t learn anywhere else.”

This paper certified that Wong Kim Ark was able to follow through with his plan to leave the United States and return. Three men signed this letter attesting to his identity. Included with the attestation is a signature of the witness, who is the notary Robert M. Edwards, and a photograph of Wong Kim Ark.

As it came up to the Supreme Court, the case turned on the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Trump’s attorneys trained their focus on the second part of that clause: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” That line, they argued, excludes many immigrants in the country illegally and legally.

Trump and his allies say the language was never intended to automatically entitle foreign nationals to citizenship for their children. When the framers included the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” they say, that meant that birthright citizenship would be extended to people who have a “direct and immediate allegiance” to the United States. One clear way to establish that allegiance, the government said, is to be “domiciled” in the country and not just passing through.

There have long been exceptions to birthright citizenship, the government noted, including for the children of diplomats and, for much of the nation’s history, Native American children. That’s because, the Trump administration argued, the parents of those children did not principally owe allegiance to the United States. Similarly, the government said, foreign nationals owe their allegiance to their native land.

But the groups challenging Trump’s order noted that none of those words — allegiance or domicile — were included anywhere in the text of the 14th Amendment. And they pointed to a landmark 1898 decision from the Supreme Court, US v. Wong Kim Ark, in which the justices read the 14th Amendment to grant citizenship to the son of Chinese nationals.

Demonstrators with Concerned Women for America, a conservative evangelical group, wait outside the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on June 29.

Polls find much of the public supportive of rules restricting transgender athletes from competition.

In a Marquette Law School poll released in May, 63% of US adults said that “state laws that prohibit transgender girls and women from participating on girls’ and women’s sports teams” should be found constitutional by the Court, and 37% that they should not be.

A similar 7 in 10 voters in a June Quinnipiac poll said that transgender women and girls should not be allowed to play on women’s and girls’ school sports teams.

And in an April Reuters/Ipsos survey, 67% of US adults said they supported “banning transgender girls and women from participating in female sports events in schools and colleges.” Support for such restrictions has risen in recent years, Pew Research analysis from last February suggests.

Demonstrators hold placards near the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, on April 1.

There’s broad public support for upholding the concept of birthright citizenship, according to recent polling.

In a Marquette Law School poll released in May, after being given a short summary of the Supreme Court case, 68% of US adults said the court should rule that “the 14th amendment makes all those born in the U.S. citizens,” with 32% saying it should allow an executive order limiting citizenship to children born with at least one citizen parent or to lawful permanent residents.

Other surveys have found similarly broad backing. An April Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll found 65% of Americans opposed to “ending birthright citizenship, under which anyone born in the United States is a United States citizen”; a June Quinnipiac survey of registered voters found that 69% favored keeping in place the 1898 ruling that anyone born in the US is a US citizen, regardless of their parents’ citizenship.

But an April AP-NORC poll found that support can vary depending on the details provided: 65% of US adults said that the country should grant citizenship automatically to all children born in the US. Asked about several specific scenarios, however, fewer supported birthright citizenship for children born in the US to parents in the country legally on tourist visas (58%) or to parents in the country illegally (49%).