KEY POINTS:
- West Virginia is not allowed to enforce its law that bans transgender athletes from female sports teams.
- It comes after the US Supreme Court refused to immediately reinstate the law.
- The plaintiff argues the law is in violation of the US Constitution.
The United States Supreme Court has refused to let West Virginia enforce a state law banning transgender athletes from female sports teams at public schools, one of many Republican-backed measures across the country targeting LGBTIQ+ rights.
The justices denied West Virginia's request to lift an injunction against the law that a lower court had imposed while litigation continues over its legality in a challenge brought by a 12-year-old transgender girl, Becky Pepper-Jackson. Two conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, publicly dissented from the decision.
The law, passed in 2021, designates sports teams at public schools including universities according to "biological sex" and bars male students from female athletic teams "based solely on the individual's reproductive biology and genetics at birth".
In the lawsuit, Pepper-Jackson and her mother Heather argued that the law discriminates based on sex and transgender status in violation of the US Constitution's 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law as well as the Title IX civil rights law that bars sex-based discrimination in education.
The United States Supreme Court has refused to let West Virginia enforce a state law banning transgender athletes from female sports teams at public schools. Source: AAP, EPA / Michael Reynolds
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said he was "deeply disappointed" by the decision but predicted the state would ultimately prevail. "It's just basic fairness and common sense to not have biological males play in women's sports," he said.
"This was a baseless and cruel effort to keep Becky from where she belongs–playing alongside her peers as a teammate and as a friend," the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal, an LGBTIQ+ legal group, said in a statement. The groups are representing Pepper-Jackson along with the Cooley law firm.
Pepper-Jackson, who attends a middle school (typically for grades five to nine) in the West Virginia city of Bridgeport, sued after being prohibited from trying out for the girls' cross-country and track teams.
Republicans in various states have pursued - limiting transgender participation in sports, access to gender-affirming medical care, and the teaching of subjects related to gender identity or sexual orientation. A federal judge on Friday temporarily a Tennessee law restricting drag performances in public.
The West Virginia case required the Supreme Court to confront the issue of transgender rights - a major front in the US culture wars - in the wake of its 2020 protecting gay and transgender employees under a longstanding federal law barring workplace discrimination.
US District Judge Joseph Goodwin initially blocked the law, allowing Pepper-Jackson to participate on the teams. But in January the judge reversed course, finding that the state measure was lawful.
The 4th Circuit subsequently issued an injunction while the case proceeds.
