Behind the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Transgender Athletes
Key takeaways
- The plaintiffs’ strategy—to convince the Court that the fact that a girl is transgender doesn’t mean she is bound to be a champion—was understandable.
- The LedeReporting and commentary on what you need to know today.
- But the Court split 6–3 on whether these bans violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause.
Photograph by Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story In January, during oral arguments in the Supreme Court, in a case about whether states may exclude transgender female athletes from girls’ sports teams, the lawyer for Becky Pepper-Jackson, a transgender teen-ager, made a point of emphasizing her athletic mediocrity. Competing on her school’s track-and-field and cross-country teams, “where nobody was cut,” her lawyer said, “she came in near the back.” Becky (known in the case as B.P.J.) hadn’t gone through male puberty, and didn’t have male testosterone levels, because she had taken puberty blockers and was on female hormones. The other transgender plaintiff, an Idaho college student named Lindsay Hecox, had gone through male puberty, but, her brief said, she “was not fast enough” to make her university’s N.C.A.A. cross-country and track teams, so she played club sports instead. The plaintiffs’ strategy—to convince the Court that the fact that a girl is transgender doesn’t mean she is bound to be a champion—was understandable. The concern about transgender girls competing on girls’ teams stems from a belief that they have an inherent sex-related athletic advantage over other girls. If the advantage goes away, the plaintiffs’ reasoning went, the concern should go away, too.
Twenty-seven states have laws—including the ones at issue in this case, West Virginia and Idaho—that separate sports teams based on sex identified at birth, or “biological sex,” thereby excluding transgender girls from girls’ and women’s teams. (The N.C.A.A. and the International Olympic Committee have adopted similar rules.) On Tuesday, the Court unanimously decided that such policies do not violate Title IX, the federal law that prohibits federally funded schools from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” All nine Justices agreed that it is consistent with Title IX’s meaning for schools to define “sex” as “biological sex” for the purpose of separating athletic teams by sex—that schools may exclude transgender girls, or “biological males,” from girls’ and women’s sports teams.
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