California Advocates Fearful as Supreme Court Weighs Bans of Trans Student Athletes

When Trevor Norcross’s daughter entered high school, she joined the women’s track team. Competing as a sprinter and a long jumper for her San Luis Obispo campus, he said, immediately gave her joy.

“After the first track practice when we picked her up and brought her home, the smile on her face … to see her lighten up and … brighten up — that is, as a parent, that’s everything,” Norcross, whose daughter is now a junior, told KQED.

Earlier that year, she had come out as transgender. For the first time, he said, she was able to participate on a sports team that aligned with her gender identity.

“When she was in junior high and participating on the other gender sports team in cross-country and track and starting to understand who she was, she wasn’t fully there,” Norcross recalled. “Her saying, ‘I’m participating on the girls team,’ and the joy and acceptance that was there was amazing.”

California’s state law requires public schools to allow transgender students to play on teams consistent with their gender identity. But amid national debates about competitive advantage, more than half of U.S. states have passed legislation prohibiting transgender girls from participating in women’s sports teams in schools in recent years.

After hearing oral arguments in two cases challenging such bans in Idaho and West Virginia on Tuesday, the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, appears poised to side with the states. Parents in the Bay Area worry that a forthcoming ruling could spur new challenges to California’s protective laws for trans youth — especially after Gov. Gavin Newsom suggested both in a podcast interview with late activist Charlie Kirk and again to KQED in October that in some cases, allowing transgender women and girls to compete in women’s sports is unfair and that he hasn’t “been able to reconcile it.”

The state also faces a pending lawsuit from the Department of Justice over its refusal to bar trans female athletes from high school teams.

“Even in California, it doesn’t at all feel like a safe haven,” said one East Bay mom, who has a 17-year-old transgender son. KQED is not using her or her son’s name out of concerns for her family’s safety. “There’s constant efforts to roll back and restrict the protections that we have and find ways to discriminate against our kids, even with the laws that we have in place.”

Both Idaho and West Virginia’s solicitor generals, arguing on the states’ behalf Tuesday, said that their laws passed in 2020 and 2021 prohibiting trans girls and women from competing in women’s sports are legal under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. These laws allow schools to make distinctions on the basis of sex, they argued, and allow schools to place athletes on teams on the basis of sex to “preserve fairness and safety.” They made the case that transgender athletes, who hold “countless competitive advantages,” according to Idaho, “displaces” cisgender competitors.

But the athletes’ legal teams say that’s not categorically true, and that the states are discriminating against their clients on the basis of sex.

Attorneys for Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 15-year-old shot put and discus athlete in West Virginia, wrote in a brief filed with the court that West Virginia law’s “exclusion of [Pepper-Jackson] from girls’ sports teams not only treats [her] differently — it treats her worse.”

She and her mother sued the state in 2021 over its “Save Women in Sports” Law, which prohibited Pepper-Jackson from joining her middle school’s track and cross country teams.

Lindsay Hecox, who is now in her final year at Boise State University, sued Idaho after it passed a similar law the previous year, preventing her from trying out for the university’s NCAA track and cross country teams as a freshman.

Both legal teams say that only allowing the athletes to participate on a men’s team effectively prohibits them from participating at all, since it would be counter to the medical treatment and social work they’ve done to transition.

The mom in the East Bay said that for her son, being able to join the middle school boys’ water polo team when he transitioned had the opposite effect on his well-being.

“It was like an external validation of everything he felt internally,” she told KQED. “He knew he was a boy and being on the boys team and being accepted by that team and being able to compete with them … that helped him know that his community saw him as he really is.”

The justices appeared sympathetic to the states’ cases on Tuesday, posing questions about fairness and whether some medical gender-affirming treatment eliminates any physiological athletic advantage that they might have. Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked why the Court should “try to constitutionalize a rule” amid that uncertainty.

In recent months, the Court has upheld state laws that ban some gender-affirming medical treatments for minors, and allowed an order from President Donald Trump barring transgender people from serving in the military to remain in place as it undergoes appeal.

Still, it’s unclear how broad a ruling the Court will issue.

Attorneys for both athletes have asked that their clients’ cases be assessed individually, taking into account the circumstances of their transitions.

Pepper-Jackson’s lawyers say she never went through endogenous male puberty, since she was put on hormone-blocking therapy prior, and took estrogen that spurred female hormonal puberty. When she transitioned, Hecox took medication to suppress testosterone after puberty, and estrogen through prescribed hormone therapy, “minimizing the impact of testosterone in the body.”

Idaho’s arguments “all depend on the contested proposition that transgender women and girls have an athletic advantage over cisgender women and girls — even when (as in Lindsay’s case) their circulating testosterone is typical of cisgender women,” Hecox’s attorneys wrote in a brief to the court.

They contend that per the lower courts’ record on her case, “Lindsay has no advantage over her cisgender peers.”

At the national level, both the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee have recently disallowed transgender women and girls in women’s events.

Both Norcross and the mom in the East Bay said they’ve seen opposition to trans students’ participation in sports in their own communities, in places like local school board meetings to religious congregations.

In October, California passed state legislation that sets up a commission to study inclusion in youth sports, including for trans kids. While the bill said the study will aim “to improve access to and involvement in sports for all youth, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity,” some advocates worry that it could lead to restrictions on trans youth’s participation.

After a high school athlete in California garnered national attention for her success in multiple track and field events last spring, the California Interscholastic Federation piloted a policy during state finals that allowed an additional student to compete in events that a transgender athlete qualified for.

Parents of trans athletes in California worry that such a policy could discriminate against and out trans athletes.

They also told KQED that even if their children aren’t directly impacted, uncertainty and the use of harmful rhetoric at the national level still threaten hard-fought rights in California.

“To take all of the normal stresses of being a child and a teenager in this world, and being a trans person, and then layer on top of it hearing high-level politicians saying that you’re evil, or hearing people try to say that you don’t belong, and fearing that something that brings you joy and validation, like sports, is going to be away? It’s awful,” the East Bay mom told KQED.

“This is a deliberate strategic choice to callously disregard harming these kids in order to achieve a political agenda. And it’s just heartbreaking and devastating.”