US Supreme Court upholds state bans on transgender girls in school sports: What the ruling means

US Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams, upholding laws in Idaho and West Virginia banning them from female sports teams.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, which has ruled against transgender Americans historically, stated in the judgement that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia don’t violate the Constitution or the federal law known as Title IX, AP reported.

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Lower court decisions overturned on contentious issue

The matter is a contentious issue in the US, and the justices overturned decisions by lower courts favouring transgender students who challenged the bans in Idaho and West Virginia, terming the curbs a violation of the country’s Constitution and a federal anti-discrimination law.

Both states designate sports teams at public schools, including universities, as per “biological sex” and bar “students of the male sex” from female teams. Twenty-five other states have similar laws on the books.

Unanimous consensus on Title IX civil rights statute

The court decided 9-0 that the state laws do not violate the Title IX civil rights statute that bars discrimination in education “on the basis of sex.”

Ideological splits on the 14th Amendment guardrails

The justices had ideological differences, with six conservative justices in the ⁠majority, that ​the laws also do not violate the Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law. The three liberal justices was quoted as saying by AP a factual dispute in the West Virginia case should have precluded resolving that issue.

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“Consistent with Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, we hold that the states may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females. They may determine eligibility for women’s and girls’ sports based on biological sex. The Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women’s and girls’ sports throughout America,” the court ruling read.

Political support and arguments for competitive fairness

Notably, Republican President Donald Trump’s administration, which went down heavily upon transgender rights, has supported the states in the litigation. Idaho and West Virginia said the laws preserve fair and safe competition ⁠for women and girls, while critics see the measures as part of a broader assault on the rights of transgender Americans.

Distinct separation of sex in the sports context

The students who challenged the measures said they discriminate based on a person’s sex or status as transgender in violation of the 14th Amendment and Title IX. “Sports are different from, ‌say, a typical employment or educational opportunity where equal protection often may require that the government generally treat an individual without regard to the individual’s sex,” Kavanaugh wrote in the ruling.

“In the sports context, by contrast, everyone agrees that the states may maintain separate women’s and men’s teams — in other words, that the states may make distinctions based on sex — because of the inherent physical differences between women and men.”

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Defining statutory language by biological standards

Kavanaugh said Title IX was a landmark law that “promoted equal opportunity for female student-athletes and has facilitated the extraordinary growth of women’s and girls’ sports over the past 54 years.”

The term “sex” in the 1972 statute, he said, “cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.”

Kavanaugh said the states’ laws likewise did not violate the Equal Protection Clause by barring transgender girls from playing on female sports teams, saying the bans furthered the states’ substantial interests in “safety and competitive fairness.”