West Virginia v. B.P.J is a major victory for females, commonsense, and the natural order

On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court leveled the playing field in a major victory for women’s sports. In West Virginia v. B.P.J., together with Little v. Hecox in one opinion, the Justices upheld laws from West Virginia and Idaho banning males claiming to be transgender from participating in sports for females.

Given the far-reaching consequences of B.P.J., this column first reviews the backgrounds in both cases before highlighting the Justices’ rationales. The article then offers analysis and commentary on why B.P.J. is a significant victory in preserving life’s natural order by its finding that sports for women are only for women.

To this end, Justice Thomas’ concurrence succinctly observed: “[m]en and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are. Sex is an immutable ‘biological’ characteristic, it is binary; and ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ ‘boy’ and ‘girl,’ are the terms that correspond to adults and children of each sex.”

Background to Little v. Hecox

Little v. Hecox involved a challenge to Idaho’s 2020 Fairness in Women’s Sports Act. Idaho was the first state law banning transgender athletes from competing on teams for females in any state-funded educational institutions. Litigation began in 2020 when a transgender athlete, Lindsay Hecox—a biological male who failed to qualify for Boise State University’s track and cross-country teams, but competed at the club level—filed suit and questioned the law.

In August 2020, the federal trial court enjoined the Act’s enforcement as likely violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, under which individuals or groups who “are similarly situated should be treated alike.” On appeal in June 2024, the Ninth Circuit affirmed in Hecox’s favor that the law violated the equal protection rights of transgender individuals by barring them from teams corresponding to their self-declared gender identities.

The court also thought that the law discriminated due to sex because athletes on teams for females, but not males, suffer “invasive sex verification procedures.” The Ninth Circuit then refused to hear an en banc appeal before all of its active members.

Background to West Virginia v. B.P.J.

In West Virginia v. B.P.J., a biological male identifying as transgender, Becky Pepper-Jackson, and his mother challenged a 2022’s West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act barring men from competing in women’s sports.

The federal trial court enjoined the law, allowing B.P.J. to compete on the middle school girls’ track and cross-country teams, but in January 2023 upheld the statute.

After the Supreme Court refused to intervene in April 2023, with Justices Alito and Thomas dissenting, in April 2024, the Fourth Circuit reversed in favor of B.P.J., invalidating the law for violating Title IX’s prohibition against “discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance by discriminating on the basis of sex…”

Later developments

On September 2, 2025, Lindsay Hecox petitioned the Supreme Court to dismiss the case as moot after voluntarily signing an agreement not to participate on women’s teams. On July 3, 2024, though, the Justices agreed to hear appeals filed by Idaho and West Virginia. At issue before the Supreme Court in Hecox was “[w]hether laws that seek to protect women’s and girls’ sports by limiting participation to women and girls based on sex violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.”

West Virginia v. B.P.J. addressed “1. Whether Title IX prevents a state from consistently designating girls’ and boys’ sports teams based on biological sex determined at birth. 2. Whether the Equal Protection Clause prevents a state from offering separate boys’ and girls’ sports teams based on biological sex determined at birth.”

During oral arguments on January 13, 2026, a majority of the Supreme Court seemed poised to uphold the laws banning males claiming to be transgender from participating in sports for females.

Opinion of the Court

In B.P.J., there was a six-to-three judgment, authored by Justice Kavanaugh and joined by Chief Justice Roberts, Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett, with separate concurrences by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch. The Court held that because Title IX allows schools to provide separate women’s and men’s sports teams defined by biological sex, it did not violate B.P.J.’s right to equal protection.

Justice Sotomayor’s authored a partial concurrence and partial dissent that Justices Kagan and Jackson joined. Justice Jackson filed a separate opinion partially concurring and partially dissenting.

In the second paragraph of his twenty-nine page opinion for the Court, Justice Kavanaugh acknowledged that men and women have “inherent physical differences relevant to athletic performance…[such as] height, weight, strength, speed, endurance, and jumping ability.” These differences, he added, “forc[e] female athletes to compete against males can create significant safety risks” in contact sports such that “can undermine competitive fairness.” Consequently, he explained that “schools therefore typically maintain separate women’s and men’s sports teams.”

Turning specifically to the Title IX claim, Justice Kavanaugh held that because the law “permits schools to maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females…“[s]eparate sports teams for biological males and biological females are reasonable,…noting that “in recent years, 27 States—as well as the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and the NCAA—have banned all biological males from competing in women’s and girls’ sports.”

Kavanaugh then easily rejected B.P.J.’s reliance on Bostock v. Clayton County’s having expanded the reach of Title VII’s prohibit[ion against] employment discrimination because of . . . sex.” Kavanaugh explained that Title VII was inapplicable because it dealt with employment, while Title IX explicitly provides equal opportunities for women in sports. Rounding out this section, Kavanaugh noted that “Title IX allows schools to provide separate women’s and men’s sports teams defined by biological sex. Consistent with Title IX, West Virginia has permissibly maintained women’s and girls’ sports for biological females.”

Turning to the equal protection claim, Justice Kavanaugh applied intermediate scrutiny, under which state actions are constitutional if, as here, they are “’substantially related’ to achieving [the] “important” government objective” of safety for women rather than requiring them to risk injuries by competing against biological men. Kavanaugh thus rejected B.P.J.’s equal protection claim because West Virginia’s law treats B.P.J. the same as other athletes insofar as it treats transgender girls the same as boys who are not transgender.

Justice Kavanaugh concluded that, because Title IX allows schools to provide separate sports teams for men and women as defined by their genders, it did not violate B.P.J.’s right to Equal Protection.

Concurrences

Justice Thomas’ brief, two-page concurrence aptly focused on the biological differences between women and men that the dissent ignored.

Justice Gorsuch’s five-page concurrence zeroed in on Congressional spending clause authority, commenting that “Title IX does not clearly and unambiguously alert funding recipients that they are prohibited from sponsoring sports teams restricted to biological women or girls.”

Dissents

Justice Sotomayor’s thirty-three-page dissent, which was longer than the opinion of the Court, agreed that West Virginia’s law did not violate Title IX but ignored the safety of women. Then, without specifying what harm it caused, she argued that the Court “inflicts a hardship on those it disfavors without giving them the fair and full opportunity the Constitution requires to litigate their contentions.”

Justice Brown’s incoherent three-page dissent “agree[d] with my colleagues that her [B.P.J.’s] Title IX claim fails,” but, relying on Bostock, argued that B.P.J. “suffers discrimination on the basis of sex—yes, sex assigned at birth—when she is excluded from the girls’ team because she was assigned male at birth.”

Her final paragraph argued that “the majority is wrong to suggest that the term ‘sex’ in Title IX ‘cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.'”

Analysis and Commentary

B.P.J. is a significant victory because the Supreme Court restored a measure of common sense by upholding the need for fundamental fairness in light of the biological differences between females and males in safeguarding women’s rights to participate safely in fair competitions against other females in states with similar statutes.

It is nothing short of incredulous that the Court’s three dissenters, all women, ignored biological realities in not caring about the safety of female athletes who risk injuries competing against men. The dissenting Justices placed ideology ahead of the biological realities the Court focused on in recognizing that while women and men are, of course, equal, because males tend to be larger and stronger due to the differences in their bodies, permitting transgender males to compete against them places females at significant risks of harm.

In terms of the risk of physical harm to female athletes, a well-publicized incident from North Carolina starkly illustrated what can happen when women compete against transgender opponents who are bigger and stronger. Payton McNabb was badly injured when a male competitor, claiming transgender status, spiked a ball that struck her in the head, causing her to suffer a serious concussion that ended her dream of playing volleyball in college. Sadly, proponents of allowing transgender athletes to participate seem to have few or no concerns for the safety of female athletes.

As further evidence of the disparities between males and females, one need only look at the results of direct competitions. For example, in 2017 the United States (Women’s) National Team lost to the FC Dallas U-15 boys academy team, 5–2 and an under-14 boys soccer team beat the University of Washington’s women’s team that won the Big Ten Championship, while the Swiss Women’s National Team, ranked twenty-third in the world, lost to an under-15 boys team by a score of 7-1.

Aware of biological reality, in a June 2025 case from Tennessee, United States v. Skrmetti, that I wrote about in Catholic World Report, the Supreme Court upheld a law banning puberty blockers for minors claiming to be transgendered on which West Virginia’s law partially relied. In Skrmetti the Court reasoned that disputes over transgender “implicated ‘fierce scientific and policy debates’ that elected legislators are best able to resolve.” In so doing, the Justices “follow[ed] the science” in B.P.J. by acknowledging that because there are two sexes, states have the authority to ban males from sports for females.

During the recent COVID pandemic, supporters of mandatory experimental vaccines demanded that all “follow the science.” Despite this, even though, with very rare exceptions, women are born with XX chromosomes and males with XY, activists continued to ignore the science by placing ideology ahead of biological reality in allowing males to compete with females despite their size and strength differences that place women athletes at significant risk of injury.

Yet, the battle for the rights of women athletes is far from over, as activists on the Supreme Court and in the remaining states are unlikely to protect the well-being of females, who work so hard to be able to participate in fair competitions against other women. Still, B.P.J. is a significant step in the right direction to restoring some sanity in sports while offering hope for women athletes in the remaining states.