Supreme Court invited into debate over transgender athletes
The highest court in the United States will rule on the case of a transgender girl.
Published
The very conservative Supreme Court of the United States was asked Friday to intervene in the case of a transgender girl who wants to join the women’s running team of her college. This is the first time that the high court has been called upon to rule on the place of transgender athletes in women’s sport, a very political debate that is raging throughout the United States.
Concretely, the file concerns a law adopted in 2021 by West Virginia which, like several other conservative states, prohibits students defined as “males” on the basis of their “biology at birth” from joining female competitions. As soon as it was passed, the law was challenged in court by Becky Pepper-Jackson, a transgender girl, then 11 years old, who wanted to get on her school’s cross-country team. After several twists and turns, a federal appeals court decided on February 22 to freeze the law while waiting to examine the merits of the case.
West Virginia then turned urgently to the Supreme Court to ask it to lift this blockage, so that its law could apply as long as the procedure continues.
No substantive decision
“In recent years, biological males who identify as female have increasingly beaten biological females in women’s competitions,” she wrote in her appeal, asking the court to “protect fairness” in women’s sports. West Virginia “talks about elite athletic competitions, which has nothing to do” with the Becky Pepper-Jackson file, retorted several associations that support her – including the powerful ACLU – in a press release.
When the teenager was able to participate in women’s races “she often finished in the last” but “her mother has never seen her so happy”, her lawyers had underlined in a court document. The Supreme Court is not called upon to rule on the merits at this stage and could simply confirm or reverse the decision of the Court of Appeal without saying more.
So far, she has avoided getting into legal battles over transgender rights, except for a ruling on workplace discrimination: In 2020 she vindicated a funeral home that fired a transgender employee after her transition.
(AFP)
