The Supreme Court’s Trans Athlete Ban Cases Are About Much More Than Sports

The battle over the legality of bans on trans athletes raises greater questions around privacy and sex discrimination in education.

The Supreme Court will hear back-to-back oral arguments on Tuesday for two cases that both consider whether state laws banning transgender girls and women from playing on women’s sports teams violate federal law and the Constitution.

On the stacked-argument day, the justices will first deliberate on Little v. Hecox, a lawsuit brought in Idaho by a trans college student, and West Virginia v. BPJ, brought by a trans high school student and her mother. The plaintiffs in both cases, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, allege that state bans on trans girls participating in sports violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and that West Virginia’s law in particular violates Title IX.

The cases could have sweeping implications for both transgender and cisgender girls and women, and raise broader legal questions around sex discrimination and privacy in education, advocates said.

In 2020, Idaho passed House Bill 500, the first ban on trans girls’ and women’s participation in women’s athletics to be enacted nationwide. The law includes a provision that allows anyone to dispute a student-athlete’s sex, which would subject them to what civil rights advocates have called invasive sex-verification, including having a doctor verify a student’s sex based on their “reproductive anatomy, normal endogenously produced levels of testosterone, or genetic makeup.”

That same year Lindsay Hecox, a trans woman who was then a freshman at Boise State University, sued Idaho hoping to be able to try out for the women’s track and cross-country team. She eventually won her case both in the district court and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, before the Supreme Court granted Idaho’s petition to hear the case in July last year. (Hecox has since argued that her case is moot because she no longer plays or intends to play any college sports. She noted that she feared she would be subjected to harassment if she continued with the suit, and worried that it would impact her mental health and safety.)