Court Cases | Page 5 of 193 | American Civil Liberties Union

Q: What issues are before the court?

The issue before the Supreme Court in West Virginia v. B.P.J. is whether categorically excluding all transgender girls and women from participating on girls' and women's teams violates the Equal Protection Clause or Title IX. However, the Court could issue a much broader ruling allowing for — and potentially requiring — discrimination against transgender people in many more contexts.

Question 1

What issues are before the court?

Accepted Answer

The issue before the Supreme Court in West Virginia v. B.P.J. is whether categorically excluding all transgender girls and women from participating on girls' and women's teams violates the Equal Protection Clause or Title IX.

However, the Court could issue a much broader ruling allowing for — and potentially requiring — discrimination against transgender people in many more contexts.

Question 2

How could the Supreme Court rule in this case?

Accepted Answer

The Court will determine whether states can ban transgender students from youth sports, and if transgender students share the same rights as cisgender students under Title IX and the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. The Court's ruling could be limited to the context of athletics, but the decision may also implicate a broader range of rights for transgender people — and possibly other communities.

This is why, even though the number of transgender students in athletics is small, their freedom to play has become a central focus of politicians who want to push transgender people out of public life altogether. Anti-equality advocates' hope is that a Supreme Court ruling against the rights of girls like Becky will allow them to discriminate against transgender people in many more contexts and, eventually, deny us our freedom to be ourselves entirely.

Question 3

Could the Supreme Court issue a ruling that impacts other communities?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Anti-equality advocates are pushing the Court to issue a broad ruling that impacts many other communities.

Any discrimination based on sex is supposed to be subject to "heightened scrutiny" under the Equal Protection Clause, to ensure that the government does not use generalizations about how men and women should be to discriminate against individuals who don't fit those generalizations. Anti-equality advocates are pushing the Court to water-down that standard in ways that could impact all sex-based discrimination by the government.

Like in U.S. v. Skrmetti, they argue that any reference to "biological differences" should legitimize governmental discrimination and differential treatment based on sex. But throughout history, biology and biological difference have been invoked to legitimize sex-based discrimination. Defenders of these bans want to go back to a time when the government could simply invoke biology to discriminate against women and girls.

Question 4

Could the Supreme Court ban transgender youth from sports nationwide in this case?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The Trump Administration is currently arguing in other cases that the Equal Protection Clause and Title IX don't just allow, but require, schools to exclude transgender women and girls from sports. And the administration is threatening to withhold funds from states and schools unless they agree to discriminate against transgender girls through lawsuits against states. If the Supreme Court issues a broad ruling in this case, it could ultimately result in a nationwide ban on including transgender women and girls in women's and girls' scholastic sports.

Question 5

How many transgender athletes are there?

Accepted Answer

There is no comprehensive count of transgender student athletes in K-12, collegiate, or professional sports in the United States, but what we do know is that they represent a tiny fraction of athletes overall. The president of the NCAA even recently told Congress that "less than 10" of the more than 500,000 college athletes in the country are openly transgender, and those 10 athletes include transgender men, not just transgender women.

Nonetheless, transgender girls and women have become the focus of a relentless media campaign designed to make their participation seem like a threat to girls who are not transgender. The goal of this campaign is not only to divide us against one another, but also to secure a sweeping legal precedent that authorizes discrimination against transgender people (and other people, including gay, lesbian and bisexual people, and all women) across our lives, not just in sports.

Question 6

How will bans on transgender athletes hurt all athletes?

Accepted Answer

Many who oppose the inclusion of transgender athletes erroneously claim that allowing transgender women to participate will harm cisgender women. This divide-and-conquer tactic gets it exactly backwards. Excluding women who are transgender hurts all women. It invites gender policing that could subject any woman to invasive tests or accusations of being "too masculine" or "too good" at their sport to be a "real" woman.

As any competitive athlete can tell you, every athlete carries their own advantages and disadvantages depending on the sport, their background, their experience, their genetics, and their physical ability. Excluding transgender girls on the basis of their supposed advantages, while ignoring the wide varieties of body types and physical ability among all women, is both discriminatory to transgender girls and relies on very old stereotypes of women as inherently petite and weak (something that anyone who watches women's sports can tell you is very far from the truth).

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