The Supreme Court Got It Wrong- We Cannot Uphold Transgender Athlete Bans
It’s August. You’re a 15-year-old girl at a high school in PickAState, USA, and your soccer season is about to kick off. To prepare for the season, you will, of course, need to purchase new cleats and gear, start conditioning, get your annual check-up, and schedule your appointment to make sure that your genitals and genetic markers are not those of a biological male. The school will have this information on hand as part of an initiative by your state’s leadership to “protect girls’ sports”.
On June 30, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that laws from West Virginia and Idaho banning transgender female athletes from joining women’s sports teams were allowable and not a violation of Title IX, effectively opening the door for similar laws from 25 other states. The Supreme Court’s ruling, which fell along the expected ideological lines, will allow states to determine eligibility for women’s and girl’s sports based on biological sex.
As of 2026, 29 states have enacted laws to ban transgender students from participating in school sports. However, it’s looking like the Supreme Court is, once again, on the wrong side of another social issue that will impact a marginalized group. Justice Kentanji Brown-Jackson wrote in her dissent: “A transgender woman penalized for being perceived as aggressive has experienced discrimination ‘on the basis of sex’ just as much as a cisgender woman has, no matter that the transgender woman’s behavior matches expectations of her sex assigned at birth. Either way, the institution has imposed its gender-based expectations upon her. And either way, the institution may have violated Title IX.””
Trans people are estimated to make up 1-2% of the population of the United States; however, trans people make up less than less than 0.002% (10/500,000) of US college athletes, and even fewer of recent Olympians (0.001%) identify as trans. There are so few trans people in the United States, at a point, these laws start to feel like targeted attacks intended to further marginalize a community.
The consequences of the ruling and the laws that it is allowing could be as simple as good ol’ American discrimination and as dire as genetic testing and genital inspections. One of the major questions at stake here is who gets to determine what is female enough. These laws further open the door for public humiliation and rampant harassment of women and girls who are tall, have short hair, present more masculine, have broader shoulders, deeper voices, or a stronger jawline—traits that can be found in female humans around the world.
Furthermore, this serves as another blow to Title IX protections, a significant goal of Project 2025, the pet project of the current administration whose aim is to dismantle hard-fought protections for women in order to force them back into the home solely as wives and mothers.
It cannot be understated how significant protecting the rights of the 1% of the population is. This is where a trite reference to Pastor Martin Niemoller’s poem “First They Came” would be apt. However, we are well beyond the time for Holocaust references as warning of this regime's fascistic overreach. The matter remains that if transgender people—trans women, really—are up to have their rights and existence debated in courts, then what rights do any of us truly have? The U.S. has proven time and again what allowing a little control under the guise of “protection” can become. The Patriot Act eventually becomes facial recognition technology at the airport and Flock cameras on every street. “Protect women and girls’ sports” becomes ‘women and girls should only play low intensity sports’, or ‘women and girls shouldn’t play sports at all’. The Supreme Court got another one wrong. And, if we don’t start working on the solution, we’ll be digging ourselves out from yet another legal quagmire for 20 years.
Sources:
Supreme Court Allows States to Exclude Transgender Athletes From School Sports at the Expense of All Women and Girls, Leaving the Future of Anti-Discrimination Protections At Risk https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/supreme-court-allows-states-to-exclude-transgender-athletes-from-school-sports-at-the-expense-of-all-women-and-girls-leaving-the-future-of-anti-discrimination-protections-at-risk
Supreme Court upholds state laws banning transgender girls and women from school sports https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/supreme-court-upholds-state-laws-banning-transgender-girls-and-women-from-school-sports
West Virginia v. BPJ https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-43_2b35.pdf
Supreme Court Allows States to Bar Transgender Athletes From Girls’ Sports https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/us/politics/supreme-court-transgender-athletes.html
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