Becky Pepper-Jackson just wanted to be on the girls' middle school cross country team. Now, five years later, she's at the Supreme Court.
In 2021, West Virginia enacted a law banning transgender girls from playing on girls' and women's sports teams, from middle school through college, from the top levels of athletics down through intramural sports. But Pepper-Jackson didn't just wake up one morning and decide to identify as a girl so that she could be on the middle school cross country team—she transitioned in third grade, never went through male puberty, and has been undergoing hormone therapy. Her lawyers argue that means she wouldn't have an unfair athletic advantage against other girls—the science on that front is mixed.
