The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed a 12-year-old transgender girl to continue competing on her middle school track team, refusing to remove her from the team during a legal fight over a two-year-old West Virginia state law that 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, Becky Pepper-Jackson, took on outsize importance, with 21 states and several 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 allowed Becky to compete on the girls’ track and cross-country teams since 2021. A federal appeals court recently voted 2-1 to let her stay on Harrison County’s Bridgeport Middle School team while the family presses an appeal. The West Virginia Attorney General 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.”
Becky’s lawyers described her as a girl who enjoys running with her friends and “consistently finishes at the back of the pack” during races. Forcing her off the teams “would isolate B.P.J. from her peers and irreparably harm her during a memorable and pivotal time in her life,” her lawyers argued. 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 unaware 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 U.S. law prohibiting gender discrimination in schools receiving federal money. The Harrison County School Board didn’t join state officials seeking Supreme Court intervention. The board said last year that Becky had competed on the cross-country team “without any disruption.”
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito pointed to the absence of any explanation by either the appeals court or the Supreme Court majority. “The federal courts should not forbid enforcement of the law at issue without any explanation,” he wrote for himself and Justice Clarence Thomas.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the primary federal job-discrimination law protects LGBTQ workers. The court in 2017 had been set to consider the bathroom rights of transgender students in public schools. Still, the justices dropped the case after the Trump administration changed a pivotal federal policy. 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.