West Virginia and Idaho ask Supreme Court to decide whether states can enforce anti-transgender sports bans

Washington CNN —

West Virginia and Idaho asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to decide whether states can lawfully enforce bans on transgender students competing on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

The two appeals from GOP-led states mark the first time the high court has been asked to decide the question in a substantive way amid a yearslong legal battle waged by transgender students and their advocates against a slew of such bans enacted in more than two dozen states.

The justices have already said they will decide a separate case concerning state efforts to ban gender-affirming health care for transgender minors, but West Virginia and Idaho said that the court’s eventual decision in that matter “will not resolve” the issue at the center of their cases.

Lower courts have ruled that the states’ bans are unlawful, with a federal appeals court saying in April that West Virginia’s ban violated a 13-year-old girl’s rights under Title IX, a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex at schools that receive federal aid.

That decision, West Virginia told the justices in its petition, “renders sex-separated sports an illusion.”

“Muddled reasoning like the Fourth Circuit’s will continue without this Court’s intervention, and ‘a nationally uniform approach’ will never be possible,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey wrote in court papers.

The state went to the high court on an emergency basis in 2023 to get clearance to enforce the law while the legal challenge to it played out. But the justices, in an unsigned order, declined. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have granted the request.

Signed into law by West Virginia