Supreme Court says West Virginia trans girl can continue playing sports during challenge to state ban

The US Supreme Court has determined that a 12-year-old transgender girl in West Virginia can continue to participate in school sports that align with her gender, marking the first time that the nation’s high court has weighed into the nationwide legislative campaign to prevent trans youth from joining school sports.

On 6 April, the Supreme Court rejected the state’s attempt to enforce its ban and prevent Becky Pepper-Jackson from playing on her middle school’s track and field team.

State Attorney General Patrick Morrissey had asked the court for an emergency motion that would allow the state to enforce its ban; the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit blocked that effort, prompting an appeal to the nine-member panel on the Supreme Court.

Two of the court’s conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, stated that they would have granted the application.

West Virginia’s law appears to deny trans, nonbinary and intersex people entirely, claiming that gender is “based solely on the individual’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” It determines that a female is a person “whose biological sex determined at birth as female.”

Becky’s mother Heather Jackson said in court documents that Becky “receives puberty-delaying treatment and estrogen hormone therapy, so has not experienced (and will not experience) endogenous puberty.”

“I am not a boy,” Becky wrote in a statement to the court last year. “I do not want to run with the boys when there is a girls’ team and I should not have to run with the boys when there is a girls’ team. Running with the girls means a lot to me because I am a girl, and I should be treated like a girl, just like all my friends who are girls.”

A legal team, including American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal, said the state’s law violates the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.

At least 20 states now ban trans athletes from joining sports that align with their gender, after Kansas lawmakers voted to override the governor’s veto of legislation banning the participation of trans women and girls from school sports, joining a wave of discriminatory legislation across the US targeting LGBT+ Americans.

Anti-trans legislation and rhetoric have consumed right-wing media, this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, and, increasingly, members of Congress, where lawmakers in Washington DC are mulling national bills that mirror the proposals dominating state capitols.

One bill in the House of Representatives – filed for a third time by Republican US Rep Greg Steube – would would impose national restrictions on trans athletes of all ages by amending federal civil rights laws.

States are also increasingly engaged in legislation and policies to restrict or eliminate access to medically necessary and potentially life-saving medical care and other support systems for trans youth.

At least 10 states have enacted laws or policies banning gender-affirming care for young trans people, and more than a dozen others are considering similar measures. More than half of all trans youth in the US between the ages of 13 and 17 are at risk of losing access to age-appropriate and medically necessary gender-affirming healthcare in their home state, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

This is a developing story