In West Virginia v. B.P.J., the Supreme Court upheld a state law barring transgender girls and women from girls' sports, splitting 6-3 on the equal protection question after unanimously rejecting the plaintiff's Title IX claim. B.P.J., a transgender teenager who began puberty blockers at age 10 and never went through male puberty, had won in the lower courts, which found the law violated both Title IX and equal protection.
Justice Kavanaugh's majority opinion treated the case as sex discrimination justified by the state's interest in competitive fairness and safety, but the analysis skipped the Court's own prior requirement that sex discrimination survive an 'exceedingly persuasive justification,' a standard set in the 1996 VMI case. The majority also allowed the state to rely on general policy judgments rather than requiring proof — or even an individualized inquiry — that B.P.J. specifically posed a competitive or safety risk, a shift from cases like Orr v. Orr that required individualized assessment rather than blanket generalization.
Justice Sotomayor's dissent, joined by Kagan and Jackson, argued the real question was never whether excluding transgender athletes categorically is permissible, but whether excluding this specific plaintiff was actually justified — a factual question the majority sidestepped by simply deferring to the West Virginia legislature and citing unresolved medical debate.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.