The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that states may bar transgender athletes from competing on girls’ and women’s sports teams, upholding bans in West Virginia and Idaho, and holding that neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause requires schools to allow participation based on gender identity rather than biological sex.

The court issued a 6-3 decision in two consolidated cases, West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, with Justice Kavanaugh writing for the majority. The majority held that neither Title IX nor the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause prohibits schools from determining eligibility for women’s and girls’ sports based on biological sex. Both West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act and Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act limit female sports teams to biological females.

The first case involved BPJ, a transgender girl from West Virginia who took puberty blockers in elementary school and began undergoing hormone treatment in sixth grade. She was ultimately barred from her middle school’s girls’ cross-country and track and field teams. The second case centered on Lindsay Hecox, a transgender woman who played for the Boise State University women’s club soccer team, and who tried out for the school’s Division 1 cross-country and track teams. The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit had ruled in favor of BPJ on her Title IX claim, while the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction blocking Idaho’s law in Hecox’s case.

Justice Kavanaugh wrote that “safety and competitive fairness” are important government interests that are substantially served by restricting women’s and girls’ sports to biological females. Kavanaugh wrote that individualized judicial assessments of transgender athletes’ physical capabilities would be “an almost impossible task for a judge to perform on an equitable basis.”

Justice Thomas, concurring, wrote that gender dysphoria is “a mutable mental state that is the object of psychiatric treatment” and does not resemble the immutable characteristics, like race, sex, or national origin, on which the court has applied heightened scrutiny.

In a partial dissent, Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, argued that unresolved factual questions—including whether transgender athletes who have never undergone male puberty and receive hormone therapy retain a physical advantage—should have been resolved by the lower courts before the Supreme Court decided the equal protection question. Sotomayor agreed, however, that BPJ’s Title IX claim fails.

The decision follows the court’s 2025 ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld state restrictions on gender-affirming medical care for minors. Twenty-seven states currently restrict transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports under similar laws.

The Supreme Court reversed the rulings of the Fourth and Ninth Circuits and remanded both cases for further proceedings.