The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision on the final day of its term to uphold a pair of state laws banning transgender women and girls from competing on sports teams aligning with their gender identity has big implications for colleges and universities.
The justices ruled in West Virginia v. B.P.J. that Title IX — a sweeping law barring sex-based discrimination in federally funded colleges and schools — allows institutions to provide separate sports teams based on “biological sex.”
The court’s six conservative justices also agreed with the two states whose bans were at issue, West Virginia and Idaho, that their laws did not violate the 14th Amendment’s right to equal protection under the law.
According to the majority ruling, Supreme Court precedent allows sex-based classifications when they are “substantially related” to carrying out a government objective. The conservative justices agreed that safety and competitive fairness are important interests under that lens and found the states’ restrictions — limiting women’s and girls’ sports to “biological females” — to be “substantially related to those interests.”
The ruling presents an obvious question: What happens now for transgender athletes? In all, 27 states have enacted laws in recent years that restrict transgender athletes from playing on sports teams aligning with their gender identities.
Elizabeth Sharrow is a public policy and history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and joined an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court on behalf of the West Virginia transgender student.
“We wouldn’t accept the idea that certain kids don’t get access to the math classroom because of some condition of who they are. In fact, Title IX has created a culture where that would be an unthinkable idea,” Sharrow said. “So the notion that we’re returning to that for this group of highly marginalized and minoritized students who are trans is just very problematic to me.”
Many conservative groups and think tanks, however, are applauding the decision.
“For years, female athletes were told to stay quiet, smile, and accept unfairness. Today they were heard,” said Riley Gaines, vice chair of the America First Policy Institute’s athletes coalition in a statement after the ruling.
Gaines tied for fifth in the 200 freestyle swimming finals at the 2022 NCAA championship meet with Lia Thomas, a transgender athlete competing at the time for the University of Pennsylvania. Gaines claims she was negatively affected by the NCAA’s decision to let Thomas compete.
Will the Supreme Court decision lead to further restrictions?
The Supreme Court’s ruling is likely to embolden further efforts to restrict transgender athletes from participating in women’s and girls’ sports at the collegiate as well as K-12 levels, experts said.
Those efforts have ramped up under President Donald Trump. He signed an executive order in early 2025 declaring it U.S. policy to rescind federal funds from educational programs that allow transgender women to compete on women’s sports teams. Citing some federal courts, the order also said, “ignoring fundamental biological truths between the two sexes deprives women and girls of meaningful access to educational facilities.”
Soon after issuing the order, the administration opened an investigation into Penn over Thomas’ past participation on the women’s swimming team and froze $175 million of its federal funding. Penn cut a deal with the Trump administration to restore that funding by agreeing to a host of demands, including giving swimming records and titles to cisgender women who had lost to Thomas while also sending them personalized apology letters.
The day after Trump’s executive order, the NCAA also updated its participation policy to limit competition in women’s sports only to students assigned female at birth.
Sharrow, a former college athlete at the University of Minnesota, said cisgender women and girls should not celebrate the Supreme Court’s ruling as a victory. Sharrow asserts that 54 years after Title IX’s implementation, women’s sports teams continue to be undervalued and underfunded. “This inequality is justified in the status quo by the idea that girls and women are not capable of the same athletic feats as boys and men,” they said.
In the majority opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh cited safety concerns and reasoned that allowing a transgender woman to compete on a women’s or girls’ team would displace or disadvantage a cisgender female athlete.
“The way the majority opinion is written suggests that opportunities in many intercollegiate sports are so scarce that one trans athlete is assuredly going to knock out of the running some other cis athlete on the girls’ or women’s team,” Sharrow said. “There’s plenty of evidence of the ways in which that’s not true.” For instance, they noted that some schools are under-resourced and struggle to field teams, so there is often a spot for every athlete who wants to play.
Sam Schwartz-Fenwick, a partner with the law firm Seyfarth Shaw who represents employers as well as higher education clients, agrees. Speaking of the ruling, he said, “It is going to have a very noticeable impact on the lives of transgender individuals who are excluded from participation in states that have these bans.”
Schwartz-Fenwick also views the ruling as a “retrenchment” from the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County protecting transgender individuals from employment discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
But Indiana attorney James Nussbaum, a partner with Church Church Hittle and Antrim whose practice is focused on Title IX compliance, doesn’t see it that way.
“The Court pretty explicitly said (in West Virginia v. B.P.J.) Title VII and Title IX are different statutes. They went to great lengths to say Title VII is employment and that’s a completely different context than sports participation within an educational context,” Nussbaum said, while acknowledging that courts for a long time have used some of the analysis for Title VII and Title IX interchangeably.
What’s next for college athletics?
The Court’s ruling stops short of saying states must prevent transgender athletes from participating in women’s and girls’ sports. It just holds that states may do so.
Schwartz-Fenwick believes that many institutions in states without transgender athlete bans will remain committed to maintaining spaces where those athletes can participate because they will see doing so as consistent with their educational missions.
But he added, “They’ll have to do so knowing that the litigation risk is much higher now than it was before.”
Schwartz-Fenwick said he would not be surprised to see the administration make a renewed push to try to use Title IX, and the potential withholding of federal funds, to pressure more colleges and universities to adopt the executive branch’s position. He also said he expects more advocacy groups to target states that do not currently ban transgender athletes and claim they are violating Title IX.
Nussbaum sees the ruling as more narrow than other experts, and expects that the rights of transgender athletes will continue to vary by state. “Whether or not people agree with the decision, it offers some level of clarity so that’ll be helpful moving forward.”
He added, though, that unanswered questions remain for those advising colleges and universities.
For instance, Nussbaum said, “The first question is always what’s allowed in your state? Another is if it’s an away game, what’s allowed in the jurisdiction that we’re going to be traveling in? You have to work through those questions before you can have a clear answer.”
