Conservative Supreme Court justices on Tuesday appeared sympathetic to arguments that states can ban transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams.

The justices heard more than three hours of arguments by Idaho and West Virginia, as well as a Trump administration lawyer, defending laws that bar transgender athletes. The two cases heard back-to-back on Tuesday —Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. — were first brought by a transgender college student and high school student, respectively, who alleged that these laws violated their rights to equal protection under the Constitution and federal anti-discrimination law.

But the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority seemed poised in both cases to accept the states’ arguments that transgender identity does not equal sex, and therefore the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply.

During the first case to be heard in the back-to-back session, Little v. Hecox, both conservative and liberal justices raised questions — including those about what level of scrutiny to apply to anti-trans sports bans and whether this case itself was still valid.

But it was during the second case, West Virginia v. BPJ, that the conservative justices seemed to lean toward allowing state-level bans to stand, focusing on how to square transgender status and sex in terms of anti-discrimination law.

This case comes from Becky Pepper-Jackson, now 15, who sued the state three years ago when she was barred from trying out for the girls’ track team despite having received medication that stopped her from ever experiencing male puberty. Pepper-Jackson’s family argued, and the lower courts agreed, that the state’s law violated her rights to equal protection and Title IX.

Justices waded through a variety of hypothetical questions about differences between boys and girls with respect to everything from calculus to chess. But Justice Amy Coney Barrett seemed eager to avoid getting into “similarly situated” arguments.

“I think it opens a huge can of worms that maybe we don’t need to get into here,” she said.

However, other conservative justices pressed lawyers on broader questions of the definition of “sex.”

Hashim Mooppan, arguing on behalf of the Trump administration for Idaho and West Virginia, said that it doesn’t matter if an athlete’s testosterone levels have been suppressed, as is the case with both Hecox and Pepper-Jackson, because no amount of hormonal therapy can change their “sex” as West Virginia defines it. Under West Virginia’s statute, “biological sex” is solely based on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.

Joshua Block, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union representing Pepper-Jackson, said that Title IX, which Congress passed in 1972, bars discrimination on the basis of sex and did so without defining it. He urged the Court not to make a decision in this case based on West Virginia’s definition of sex.

“I think the purpose [of Title IX] is to make sure sex isn’t used to discriminate by denying opportunities,” Block said. “Our argument is that there’s a group of people assigned male at birth for whom being placed on the boys’ team is [harmful], and there’s a word for those people – transgender girls.”

Block said he would accept some kind of loss at the Supreme Court that might still allow the case to continue in lower courts, which have largely ruled in favor of the transgender plaintiffs.

Lawyers for plaintiffs in the first case of the morning similarly hoped for a remand decision by the justices. At the center of the case is Lindsay Hecox, a senior at Boise State University who sued over Idaho’s 2020 law banning transgender girls and women from playing women’s sports. She argued that the law violated her rights to equal protection under the Constitution, and she eventually won her case in the lower courts. In September 2025, Hecox argued that her case is moot because she no longer plays or intends to play any college or team sports in the state.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson pressed on that line of thought and highlighted the negative attention the plaintiff has received for being part of the lawsuit. If the justices don’t choose to dismiss the case as moot, they argued, they would be forcing “an unwilling plaintiff” to continue to be part of a high-profile lawsuit. Such a decision could be a dodge for the court: If the justices decide the case is moot, there would be no reason for them to rule on it, and the case would likely go back to the lower courts for any further legal process.

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch asked Alan Hurst, Idaho’s solicitor general, if transgender people should be considered a legally protected class in this case — a major and still-unanswered question that comes up in nearly all cases involving transgender rights. Gorsuch wrote a significant 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County that protected transgender employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Hurst did not fully respond to Gorsuch’s inquiry but said the court needs to consider the precedent set by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the definition of sex includes gender identity.

Another conservative justice, Amy Coney Barrett, raised questions about the implications of Idaho’s anti-trans sports law, wondering if the law would bar 6-year-olds, for example, from sports teams matching their gender identity. Hurst claimed without evidence that young boys have an inherent athletic advantage by that age, and therefore, the law could apply to children that young.

Mooppan, the Trump administration lawyer, argued that the state’s law is legitimate because so few trans women play sports. His statement is a bit ironic, considering that President Donald Trump has rolled back trans rights in part by focusing an outsized amount on this low number of trans athletes. There are about 550,000 college athletes in the country, and only about 10 of them are trans, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association told Congress in December 2024.

Idaho justifies its law by arguing that there’s a need to protect women from people with so-called “biological advantages.”

Kathleen Harnett, Hecox’s lawyer, said this distinction does not apply to her client, who has a physiology similar to any cisgender woman after receiving testosterone suppression and estrogen therapy for over a year.

Harnett noted that there are few examples of trans athletes in girls’ and women’s sports who have “participated and excelled.”

In both cases, the justices also seemed to take an interest in the question of whether one state could force its rules permitting or banning trans athletes on any other state. Currently, 27 states have restrictions on trans athletes.

“You are litigating this case the opposite way among states that do not prohibit trans women and girls from participating in sports teams. Is that correct?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Mooppan at one point during arguments in B.P.J. “You said, and I appreciate this, that we should not address that question. Are there arguments that do suggest what the answer is on that question?” Mooppan, in response, circled back to how to define sex in the context of transgender status.

Hecox and Pepper-Jackson are the only known athletes in their states who would be subject to the laws affecting trans athletes.

“What stands out today is that the Court recognizes that these extreme bans harm transgender kids and pose real fairness concerns. As multiple federal courts have recognized previously, transgender student athletes like B.P.J. and Lindsay Hecox may have no competitive advantage due to medical treatment or other reasons,” Shannon Minter, a lawyer from the National Center for LGBTQ rights, said in a statement following the oral arguments. “The Constitution does not permit states to impose blanket exclusions that ignore reality and override individual circumstances.”

The arrival of these cases on the Supreme Court’s docket is the culmination of five years of increasing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation led by right-wing lawmakers and activists.

In 2019, the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group, defended several cisgender athletes who opposed Connecticut’s inclusive sports policy. From there, the group helped author dozens of anti-trans sports bans, including for West Virginia. The ADF’s lawyers are now representing both West Virginia and Idaho.

These cases could have broad implications not only on the fate of other bans across the country, but also raise other legal questions around privacy, sex discrimination and how transgender people are treated more broadly under the law, advocates told HuffPost.

The Trump administration has targeted transgender people since his return to office last year, including by threatening to withhold federal funding from schools with trans-inclusive athletic policies, ousting trans people from the military, and barring trans people from updating their passports with the correct gender marker.