WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court has let a 12-year-old transgender girl continue competing on her middle school track team, acting for the first time on a wave of new state restrictions on athletic participation.
The justices, with no explanation and over two dissents, rejected a request by the state of West Virginia to remove Becky Pepper-Jackson from the team during a legal fight over a two-year-old state law.
The state measure allows participation on girls’ squads only for people classified at birth as female based on their reproductive biology and genetics.
The fight over a single student took on outsize importance, with 21 states and a number of prominent female athletes joining West Virginia in urging Supreme Court intervention.
West Virginia is one of 19 states that have restricted transgender student-athletes in the past three years, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which represents Becky and her mother, Heather Jackson.
Court orders have let Becky compete on the girls’ track and cross-country teams since 2021. Most recently, a federal appeals court let her stay on the team at Bridgeport Middle School while the family presses an appeal.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito pointed to the absence of any explanation by either the appeals court or the Supreme Court majority. “Enforcement of the law at issue should not be forbidden by the federal courts without any explanation,” he wrote for himself and Justice Clarence Thomas.
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey asked the Supreme Court to lift the appeals court order, calling the 2021 Sports Act “a validly enacted law representing the state’s considered judgment about the harms of allowing biological males to compete in female sports”. He said lawmakers “chose to protect fair play and safety for females.”
Running with friends
Becky’s lawyers described her as a girl who simply enjoys running with her friends and “consistently finishes at the back of the pack” during races.
Forcing her off the teams “would isolate ‘BPJ’ from her peers and irreparably harm her during a memorable and pivotal time in her life”, her lawyers argued. Court papers refer to Becky only by her initials, but the ACLU said it had parental consent to use her full name.
The family’s court filing said Becky “has known she is a girl for as long as she can remember” and is receiving puberty-delaying treatment and estrogen hormone therapy. The family says it’s not aware of any other transgender student seeking to play school sports in West Virginia.
The lawsuit accuses West Virginia of violating the Constitution’s equal protection clause and a US law that bars gender discrimination in schools receiving federal money.
West Virginia’s supporters at the Supreme Court included former tennis great Martina Navratilova and Olympic gold medal-winning swimmers Donna de Varona, Nancy Hogshead-Makar and Summer Sanders.
