The Supreme Court upheld state laws banning boys in girls’ sports in a 6-3 decision. The Court found that West Virginia and Idaho laws did not violate Title IX, a policy prohibiting sex discrimination.
“Title IX allows schools to provide separate women’s and men’s sports teams defined by biological sex, and West Virginia has permissibly maintained female sports for biological females consistent with Title IX,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion.
“The as-applied argument that the States’ sex-based classification is generally permissible—but not as applied to those biological males such as B. P. J. and Hecox who identify as female and have taken puberty blockers or hormones—fails for the same reasons. Particularly in the sports context, determining the effects of the puberty blockers and hormones taken by transgender athletes—and then comparing each of those transgender athletes’ abilities to those of other individual biological males and individual biological females in the relevant sport—would be an almost impossible task for a judge to perform on an equitable basis,” he added. “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 Sonia Sotomayor concurred in part and dissented in part, while Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
Jackson wrote in her dissent that the majority was “wrong to suggest that the term ‘sex’ in Title IX ‘cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.'” She argued that “Title IX makes room for individuals to live in the gender they choose; it cares not just about sex assigned at birth but also about individuals’ ability to match (or not) their gender presentation to their gender identity.”
The Supreme Court took up the case last year, with West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey and Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador celebrating the move.
