SCOTUS Protects Women’s Sports In Landmark Ruling 

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that states have the constitutional power to ban men from women’s sports, dealing another blow to the transgender movement. 

In a ruling authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh and joined by the other conservative justices, the Supreme Court held that Title IX  allows schools to determine eligibility for women’s and girls’ sports teams based on biological sex. Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed with parts of the majority opinion and dissented on other parts.

“They may determine eligibility for women’s and girls’ sports based on biological sex,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. “The Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women’s and girls’ sports throughout America.”

The landmark decision centered on laws passed by Idaho and West Virginia restricting transgender athletes from competing in female athletics. More than half the country has enacted similar laws to protect female sports and locker rooms. The justices upheld those bans and left for another day the question of whether Title IX requires states to prohibit transgender athletes from competing against women.

Tuesday’s ruling is also a win for the Trump administration, which issued an executive order in February 2025 directing the federal government to strip funding from schools that allow transgender students to compete in female athletics, calling the practice “demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls.”

It’s a crushing blow for transgender athletes and liberal activists, who chose to take the fight to the Supreme Court, arguing that Idaho and West Virginia’s policies discriminated based on sex and transgender status. In January, the justices heard two different sets of oral arguments in the cases of West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox. 

Idaho’s 2020 law, known as the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, was the first of its kind in the country, according to SCOTUSblog. It bans transgender students from competing on girls’ and women’s school sports teams, from elementary through college.

The West Virginia law, the Save Women’s Sports Act, was enacted in 2021. It bars transgender individuals from competing on women’s and girls’ sports teams in public secondary schools and colleges, according to SCOTUSblog.

Ahead of oral arguments, Republican officials and prominent female athletes like Riley Gaines held a press conference, saying the Supreme Court case would have far-reaching consequences for women’s privacy and safety, The Daily Wire reported. 

“The reason that we are here is because Idaho and West Virginia passed common-sense laws that delineate the athletic playing fields in our states between the sexes,” said West Virginia Attorney General John McCuskey.

Gaines, the University of Kentucky swimmer who rose to national prominence for speaking out after being forced to compete against male University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, said she was “pissed” off that the country had reached the point where it was even a debate whether women can have their own sports teams.

“I’m pissed off that we’ve reached a point where we seemingly have an entire political party who has diminished and erased our rights as women. That’s exactly what this is. Don’t let them frame it any other way,” Gaines said.

The Supreme Court’s ruling stops short of requiring states to separate sports teams by sex — it simply allows them to do so.

“We are fighting for the bare minimum here,” Gaines said. “Can we allow ourselves to be vulnerable in an intimate area of undressing, such as a locker room, without having to fear a man walking into that space? Can we do those things?”