Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Cases Involving Transgender Athletes

The court announced it would hear challenges to state laws barring transgender youth from girls’ and women’s sports.

The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that it would hear two cases testing the constitutionality of state laws that bar transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams.

The justices’ decision to hear the disputes signals that the court is willing to delve back into the fraught battle over transgender rights. In June, the court, divided along ideological lines, upheld a Tennessee law banning some medical treatments for transgender youth, a sharp blow to groups seeking to expand transgender rights.

The cases accepted on Thursday stem from legal challenges to state laws limiting the participation of transgender athletes in Idaho and West Virginia. Since 2020, 27 states have barred transgender youth from playing sports in school athletic programs.

The justices agreed to hear the disputes during the next term, which begins in early October. They have not yet set a date for oral arguments. A decision in the cases is likely to come by late June or early July 2026.

The cases involve two transgender athletes, Becky Pepper-Jackson, a West Virginia student who transitioned in third grade and takes puberty-blocking medication, and Lindsay Hecox, an Idaho college student who receives testosterone suppression and estrogen treatment. The two sued to challenge state laws barring transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports.

They argued that the laws violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. Lower courts blocked the laws from going into effect for both students, and state officials then asked the justices to weigh in.

The participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports has been a major focus of the Trump administration. In February, President Trump signed an executive order that directed federal agencies to withdraw federal funding from schools that allow transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports. He and the Republican Party have challenged states and organizations that allow transgender athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s sports.

The University of Pennsylvania announced earlier this week that it had made a deal with the administration to limit how transgender athletes participate in its sports programs. The move was linked to a civil rights investigation by the Education Department after a controversy involving a transgender woman’s participation on the university’s swim team. In April, federal officials announced that they had determined that the school violated a federal law on sex discrimination by supporting the swimmer, Lia Thomas.

The Trump administration also threatened in May to withhold federal funds from California if the state did not agree to bar a transgender girl from participating in a state track-and-field meet. In early June, the Justice Department threatened legal action against California public schools if they continued to allow trans athletes to compete in high school sports. The state has allowed transgender girls to participate in girls’ sports for more than a decade.

For years, sports organizations like the N.C.A.A. and the International Olympic Committee have struggled to balance fairness with inclusion when athletes who identify as women have sought to compete in the women’s category.

The division of sports into male and female categories in the first place gave women a fair chance to succeed because male athletes — particularly ones who have gone through puberty — have biological advantages that generally make them faster and stronger, experts say. Males tend to have larger and denser bones, more muscle mass, and bigger hearts and lungs.

Some organizations tried to at least minimize the advantage by placing a limit on an athlete’s level of testosterone, which is the hormone known to increase strength, muscle mass and endurance. Yet so far there has been no foolproof way of ensuring that trans women have no retained advantage.

In February, the N.C.A.A. barred trans women from competing in women’s sports one day after Mr. Trump issued his executive order. The I.O.C. has given its international sports federations the power to make their own rules for trans participation, and so the testosterone limit for athletes varies from sport to sport.

The Supreme Court has not weighed in directly on the controversies over transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports until now.

Ms. Pepper-Jackson was about to start middle school in 2021 when West Virginia passed its law barring transgender athletes from competing on girls’ sports teams. She had hoped to try out for the girls’ cross-country team, according to a brief filed by her lawyers.

After the middle school principal told her that she would not be allowed to participate on the girls’ sports team, Ms. Pepper-Jackson brought a legal challenge, arguing that the state’s law violated federal protections against sex-based discrimination and the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law.

A federal judge entered a narrow order prohibiting the state law from being enforced against her, and Ms. Pepper-Jackson went on to join the girls’ cross-country and track-and-field teams.

In an emergency order in April 2023, the justices had ruled that she could continue to compete while an appeal moved forward, and the next year, a panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit blocked the law from being enforced against Ms. Pepper-Jackson.

This season, she competed on her high school’s track-and-field team, excelling in the discus and shot-put events to become one of just a few first-year students statewide in those disciplines to qualify for the state championship meet in Class AAA. At the state meet in May, she finished third in the discus and eighth in the shot-put.

Lawyers for West Virginia argued that the state wanted to draw clear lines between boys’ and girls’ sports that have long “guaranteed that women and girls had a real chance to compete safely and fairly.”

In recent years, they said in a brief, “the lines have begun to blur” and “female athletes have been demoralized, as they have been pushed further down the competitive ladder, out of tournaments and off their teams.”

“It’s a great day, as female athletes in West Virginia will have their voices heard,” JB McCuskey, West Virginia’s attorney general, said in a statement. Mr. McCuskey added that he was confident the Supreme Court would uphold the state’s law.

In the Idaho case, Little v. Hecox, Ms. Hecox, then a first-year student at Boise State University, sued to challenge a 2020 Idaho law barring transgender girls and women from playing on sports teams through college.

In a brief, lawyers for Ms. Hecox accused state officials of trying to “create a false sense of national emergency when nothing of the sort is presented by this case.” They said that Ms. Hecox’s case was about how the law applied to “one woman,” which allowed her “to participate in club running and club soccer in her final year of college.”

After a lower court allowed Ms. Hecox to continue to participate in sports, Idaho’s attorney general, Raúl R. Labrador, asked the Supreme Court to weigh in. He was joined by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative Christian legal group that has brought a number of Supreme Court challenges on behalf of groups opposed to abortion, insurance coverage for contraception, and gay and transgender rights.

“We should be seeking to protect women’s sports and equal opportunities, and West Virginia’s and Idaho’s women’s sports laws accomplish just that,” Kristen Waggoner, the alliance’s chief executive, president and chief counsel, said on Thursday. She added that the group was “pleased the court will listen to the countless girls across the country speaking out on this issue and restore fairness and safety for female athletes.”

Both students challenging the state laws are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. The organization also represented the plaintiffs in the unsuccessful challenge to the Tennessee law limiting transgender medical treatment for youths.

“Categorically excluding kids from school sports just because they are transgender will only make our schools less safe and more hurtful places for all youth,” Joshua Block, senior counsel for the organization’s L.G.B.T.Q. and H.I.V. Project, said in a statement.