The US Supreme Court has ruled that states may restrict participation in girls' and women's sports to 'biological females,' effectively excluding transgender athletes from competing. The decision, handed down last week, upholds laws in 27 states that have enacted such bans over the past six years. The cases before the court challenged West Virginia's Save Women's Sports Act and Idaho's Fairness in Women's Sports Act.
Majority Opinion and Rationale
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, upheld the laws' legality under Title IX, the federal statute guaranteeing women's equal participation in college sports, and their constitutionality under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The ruling also vindicates Donald Trump's February 2025 executive order 'Keeping Men out of Women's Sports,' which withdraws funding from educational programs that 'deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities.' The order claims that such programs result in 'endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls' and deprive them of privacy.
Criticism of the Ruling
Critics argue that the ruling and the executive order have nothing to do with privacy, safety, fairness, or dignity. In fact, the bans deprive transgender athletes of all these protections. The science underpinning the ruling is also called into question. 'A half-century of science has discovered the protean nature of sex, gender and desire,' notes Judith Levine, a journalist and frequent contributor to the Guardian. Medical advances such as safe contraceptives, effective abortion pills, and puberty blockers have enabled people to live with more freedom and agency in their bodies, benefiting women and trans people alike.
Religious and Political Context
Religious conservatives view the ruling as a defense of traditional gender norms. As Levine explains, 'If you can't tell the boys from the girls, nothing else makes sense. To deviate from a narrow, nostalgic and (in reality) never-fixed norm is to mock God.' The ruling is part of a broader assault on bodily autonomy by the Trump administration. In his first term, Trump appointed justices who overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, allowing 21 states to ban or restrict abortion. Since then, Republicans have spent $215 million on ads vilifying trans people, according to Levine.
Executive Orders and Policies
Shortly after his inauguration, Trump issued an executive order requiring the federal government to recognize only two, mutually exclusive, immutable sexes and to reflect only a person's sex assigned at birth on identity documents. In February 2025, the administration moved to begin discharging trans service members, and in May, the Supreme Court allowed a ban to go forward. In June 2025, the same conservative bloc upheld Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
Pseudoscience and Gender Ideology
Levine argues that the right deploys pseudoscience in the war on bodily autonomy. 'Anti-trans discourse offers a pink-and-blue vision of human biology and relations,' she writes. Justice Clarence Thomas's concurrence in the women's sports case summarized the theory: 'Sex is an immutable, 'biological' characteristic … it is binary, and 'man' and 'woman,' 'boy' and 'girl,' are the terms that correspond to adults and children of each sex.' However, Levine counters that humanity cannot be divided into two categories marked 'biological female' and 'biological male.' Some people are born with a mosaic of sex-related chromosomes or both male and female sex characteristics. Levels of testosterone and estrogen do not determine a person's athletic prowess, and trans people themselves are proof that sex is not immutable.
Impact on Trans People
Levine concludes that the ruling and similar policies bureaucratically eliminate trans existence. 'If a person is not real, the state is not obligated to recognize their identity, much less protect their equality,' she writes. 'In fact, if their mere existence constitutes a menace to society, the state has the duty to police their lives and deprive them of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' The crusade against trans rights, like all religious crusades, will find few willing converts, but the violence it inflicts will cause no end of pain.
