Timber wood
Protesters supporting trans athletes competing in women’s sports gather outside the Supreme Court on Jan. 13, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Heather Diehl/Getty Images
The far-right Supreme Court majority marked the final day of Pride month with an anti-trans decision upholding state bans on trans girls from playing girls’ sports. That the ruling from the right-wing court had been long expected made it no less horrendous. With a 6–3 judgment applying to two cases, one from Idaho and one from West Virginia, the court gave states nationwide carte blanche to discriminate against trans girls who want to play on teams consistent with their gender. The ruling does not constitute a nationwide ban on trans athletes, and trans girls can continue to compete in states without bans. Twenty-seven states currently have bans on the books against trans girl athletes.
All those bans — and whatever new ones come into place — can stay in place. One of the cases was just about a single girl seeking to participate in her school sports. Genital inspection is a next logical step — a step already being proposed in several states. Pointing to the absurdity, the legal scholar and trans rights advocate Alejandra Caraballo wrote on Bluesky, “Just absolutely insane to me how many millions were spent and the massive political and legal effort exhausted just so a state can ban a single trans girl from playing sports with her friends in school.”
This was always the plan for the anti-trans zealots who saw girls’ sports as an easy entry point from which to decimate trans people’s civil rights protections. It’s no surprise then that the consequences of the rulings threaten to go far beyond school and college athletics. As multiple critics of anti-trans sports bans stress, efforts to exclude trans athletes also open the door to the abuse and harassment of any girls alleged to appear insufficiently feminine.
Genital inspection and genetic testing requirements are the next logical steps — steps that have already been proposed by Republicans in several states. The Supreme Court majority argued that the anti-trans bans do not violate either Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that proscribes sex-based discrimination, or constitutional guarantees of equal protection.
Even the dissenting liberal justices ceded vital ground in the moral struggle for trans rights. Though they sided with the trans students’ claims under the equal protection clause, they agreed with the conservatives that trans-exclusionary, sex-segregated school sports bans did not violate Title IX’s prohibitions in schools. The liberal stance paints a telling picture of the decimated state of trans rights. The far right has been able to pursue its trans-eliminationist agenda to an extraordinary degree in part because liberals and even some leftists have been willing to throw trans people under the bus, if not fully align with fascistic anti-trans fearmongering.
The idea that trans girls pose a threat or danger to cisgender girls playing sports remains a myth without any evidence or grounding, conjured from whole cloth by anti-trans ideologues looking for a wedge issue to pass overreaching anti-trans laws. Today, the strategies dreamt up by well-funded think tanks and advocacy groups like the rabidly anti-trans Alliance Defending Freedom have again paid off: According to the highest court in the land, trans exclusion in sex-segregated sports does not violate civil rights. Even more anti-trans bathroom bans and other policies of exclusion from public life will no doubt follow. Anti-Trans Eliminationism
The West Virginia case was brought by Becky Pepper-Jackson, a high school student who has identified as a girl since she was 8 years old, takes puberty blockers, has a birth certificate recognizing her as female, and just wanted to compete on the athletics team with other girls. Writing the majority opinion upholding the ban against her participation, Justice Brett Kavanaugh described trans girls and women and “biological males.”
Earlier this week, anticipating the court’s ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Chase Strangio wrote, “I hope that everyone who, like me, loves sports will pause to think about what it means to exile a group of young people from the social, cultural, and emotional experience of being part of a team.”
The legal arguments for permitting anti-trans discrimination are by now familiar: The bans are not discriminatory, anti-trans bigots say, because they apply equally to those they deem biologically male and those they deem biologically female. The fact that anti-trans discrimination is unavoidably a matter of sex-based discrimination is neatly avoided in a way that erases the sex-based reality of trans people from existence.
Little matter that no current state laws are on the books relating to boys’ sports. It evidently matters even less to the Supreme Court justices that sex and gender do not exist in the sharp binary that sports bans and other anti-trans policies demand.
In an unnecessary and cruel concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas went out of his way to note, “Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe they are.”
This tells us all we need to know about the right’s designs on trans existence, reflecting an anti-trans eliminationist ideology that flies in the face of medical consensus and empirical evidence. As New York Times Magazine writer Ruth Padawer noted in an extensive 2016 feature on the practice of so-called “sex-testing” in sports, endocrinologists and geneticists have for decades challenged the delineations and exclusions such tests purports to achieve.
“Relying on science to arbitrate the male-female divide in sports is fruitless, they said, because science could not draw a line that nature itself refused to draw,” Padawer wrote. Not that this has mattered to the sports regulators and gender-conformity zealots, committed as they are to the brutal racist legacy of gender policing, and desperately pushing to exclude trans people from public life. “No student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified,” Kavanaugh had the audacity to say at the end of his opinion, upholding laws designed precisely to ostracize and vilify trans children.
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