Judge Upholds West Virginia's Trans-Exclusionary Sports Law
advocate.comWest Virginia can continue to enforce its law barring transgender girls and women from competing on female school sports teams, a federal judge ruled Thursday.The law is constitutional because the state has a recognized interest in providing equal athletic opportunities for females — that is, cisgender ones, according to U.S.
District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin of the Southern District of West Virginia.A suit against the law was filed in 2021 by Becky Pepper-Jackson, a trans girl represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, its West Virginia affiliate, Lambda Legal, and the law firm of Cooley LLP.
In July of that year, Goodwin temporarily blocked the law’s enforcement and said Pepper-Jackson could try out for girls’ sports teams.But in his Thursday ruling, Goodwin said that while Pepper-Jackson takes puberty blockers, suppressing testosterone and any physical advantage the hormone confers, it’s possible that other trans girls don’t, and therefore they would have an advantage over cis girls.“Given B.P.J.’s concession that circulating testosterone in males creates a biological difference in athletic performance, I do not see how I could find that the state’s classification based on biological sex is not substantially related to its interest in providing equal athletic opportunities for females,” the judge wrote.He said many trans girls may not have access to puberty blockers or other gender-affirming treatments, and at any rate trans people are not required to have any medical treatment and may choose only social transition.
