Supreme Court rulings favor state bans on transgender athletes and gender-affirming care
Four states — Nebraska, Washington, Colorado and Arizona — passed ballot initiatives last week that would bar transgender girls from participating in school sports. Arizona’s initiative includes private sports clubs, while Washington’s requires medical sex verification for all girl athletes in the state. The initiatives passed during midterm elections that The Guardian described as a “blue wave.” The outlet called Washington and Colorado Democratic strongholds and said Washington, Colorado and Arizona were far from deep red.
The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled in favor of state laws banning transgender athletes and gender-affirming care. The Guardian said those rulings might take years to overturn, if they are overturned at all. Nearly every federal action has been challenged in court. In a separate account of the political strategy, legal historian Marie-Amélie George said the laws already on the books had provided the groundwork for a much different second Trump term.
On his first day back in office in 2025, Trump issued an executive order that essentially redefined the legal meaning of “sex” as the genetic makeup of a person at the time of conception. Most medical experts say the explanation is unscientific, noting that a fetus’s sexual characteristics take weeks to evolve and are not always clear-cut. Elana Redfield, a federal policy expert at the Williams Institute at UCLA, said the order was effective: “In other words, the president is saying that it is now the policy of the federal government not to recognize the existence of transgender people, non-binary people, or intersex people.”
That changed the way the federal government could target transgender people from day one. “I think it’s pivotal, because it addressed a known ambiguity, and it then gives a categorical approach to the entire federal government … and that was carried out in such a dramatic, expansive and exhaustive way that it’s likely to have ramifications for decades,” Redfield said.
The order immediately affected three large sectors of the federal government: data collection, federal funding and identity documents. Federal statistical information gathering on transgender, intersex and non-binary people ended abruptly, cutting off information often used to determine where federal programs and funds were needed. Federal agencies cut off grant funding entirely for projects determined to even acknowledge the existence of transgender people. The State Department was instructed to stop issuing passports that did not match a person’s sex at birth or carried an X gender marker for intersex or non-binary people. The Guardian characterized the passport restriction as taking away a basic civil right to identity documents. Redfield said the changes were hugely impactful for the transgender population.
Within a month, Trump issued orders directing the Department of Health and Human Services to end gender-affirming care for minors nationwide by cutting off federal funding for institutions providing that care, and directing Medicare and Medicaid not to cover its costs. The Guardian reported that more than 40 hospitals with gender clinics had shut down or paused services for minors, including in “blue” states and in states where lawsuits had succeeded, often out of fear of losing federal funding.
On National Girls & Women in Sports Day, Trump issued an executive order entitled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” The Guardian described it as a “wide-reaching order” that said states or organizations with laws allowing transgender student athletes to compete in women’s or girls’ sports categories were at risk of violating Title IX and/or losing federal funding. The order also directed the Department of Education to prioritize Title IX investigations on the matter. The Guardian reported that reductions at the department’s office of civil rights by the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) had decimated Title IX investigations. It said the few remaining investigations had targeted institutions with policies inclusive of transgender people, whether in sports or admissions, such as Smith College, in lieu of inequities in women’s sports or complaints of gender discrimination, harassment or assault.
The Guardian placed healthcare, sports and education among the administration’s legal targets nationwide following the Biden-era wave of state laws. It also reported that nearly every principal in the Trump administration, from Vice President JD Vance to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, had taken up an anti-trans stance as a priority, in both word and action.
The changes have reached beyond government. The largest sports governing bodies have changed rules to disallow transgender athletes from competing in women’s divisions, including the NCAA and now the International Olympic Committee, which will host the next Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028. The Guardian also cited California Governor Gavin Newsom and senators-elect Josh Turek of Iowa, Annie Andrews of South Carolina and James Talarico of Texas as Democrats who said they opposed allowing transgender children to participate in girls’ sports.
The contrast with 2016 is sharp. Shelby Chestnut, executive director of the Transgender Law Center, remembers turning on the news that year and hearing something he did not expect: Then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had just announced a federal lawsuit to block North Carolina’s HB2, known as the “bathroom bill.” The law made it illegal for transgender people to use a public restroom that did not align with the sex listed on their birth certificate. Lynch said the law was reminiscent of those passed during the Jim Crow era that restricted public facility use by race, and addressed transgender Americans directly: “But no matter how isolated or scared you may feel today, the Department of Justice and the entire Obama administration wants you to know that we see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.” HB2 was repealed within the year. Chestnut said he thought at the time: “Oh this is the next phase of protections for trans people.”
A photograph from April 2016 shows people protesting in Raleigh, North Carolina, against a law blocking rules allowing transgender people to use the bathroom aligned with their gender identity (Gerry Broome/AP). The 2016 law prompted mass boycotts of North Carolina: almost 200 corporate leaders asked for its repeal, and the NCAA pulled seven March Madness basketball games from the state in protest. This year, Kansas and Idaho have both passed bathroom laws without comparable public outcry, though both face challenges in court. Under Idaho’s law, a person who uses a bathroom that does not correspond with the sex they were assigned at birth can be charged with a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison for a first offense. A second offense would be a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.
A photograph shows LGBTQ+ activists rallying against a proposed bathroom bill and an abortion pills bill in the outdoor rotunda of the Texas state capitol in Austin on 22 August 2025 (Austin American-Statesman/Hearst Newspapers/The Austin American-Statesman/Getty Images).
Back in 2016, before the November election, it had been just one year since the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v Hodges made marriage equality the law of the land, and the LGBTQ+ movement was at a “high point” in terms of political capital, said Marie-Amélie George, a professor and legal historian at Wake Forest Law School whose research focuses on the history of LGBTQ+ legal rights. “There was a renewed movement for all types of anti-discrimination protections to expand upon the victory of the marriage equality campaign, and the [response to] HB2 was really very much a sense of commitment to LGBTQ rights,” George said. That work often took the form of legally applying anti-discrimination laws to transgender people, Redfield said: “At the time, there was this open question about whether laws that were designed to protect against sex discrimination applied to transgender people.”
The Obama administration made some overtures toward protecting transgender people under those laws. It ended the ban on transgender troops in the US military and passed official memorandums and executive orders stating that medical providers could not deny access to transgender patients under nondiscrimination rules, that transgender prisoners should be housed based on their gender identity, and that Title IX protected transgender students. Trump mostly followed a more restrained legal tactic during his first term, rescinding Barack Obama’s moves by issuing rules withdrawing guidance on all these fronts. The Guardian noted that Trump often took rhetorical shots at social issues during that term but used executive power to specifically target transgender Americans’ rights only a couple of times.
Those rescissions were a clear signal to groups like the Transgender Law Center that it was time to prepare for a backlash, according to Chestnut. Until then, the Transgender Law Center had been one of the only litigation groups arguing that laws and ordinances banning transgender people from bathrooms or other public spaces infringed civil rights — cases it had largely won. Chestnut said the organization had convened a coalition of litigation and advocacy specialists. “At that point, we convened a coalition which birthed some of our guiding principles over the last 10 years,” Chestnut said. The Guardian described the coalition as prescient. A photograph shows same-sex marriage supporter Vin Testa, of Washington DC, waving an LGBTQ+ pride flag in front of the US Supreme Court building (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images).
By the last year of Trump’s first term, Idaho passed a law barring transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ school sports teams. It was the first such state law to pass. The Guardian described the measure as “highly controversial.” When Joe Biden took office in 2021, he rolled back the executive orders and mandates Trump had made regarding the ways federal anti-discrimination law could affect transgender Americans, including lifting the ban on transgender troops and including transgender students in Title IX protections. The Guardian described the policy change as swinging a pendulum back the other way along ideological lines and described the moves as “extremely politicized.”
By 2024, 26 states had passed laws similar to Idaho’s barring transgender students from playing school sports. During the same period, 27 states passed laws restricting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, despite all major US medical associations supporting access to that care for youth as best medical practice.
One of the reasons transgender rights were targeted by the political right was probably the lack of a “red wave” during the 2022 midterm elections, George said. After the 2022 midterm elections, the American Principles Project, a conservative thinktank, conducted a study on how Republicans might have fared better at the ballot box, and its recommendations “framed the evolution of the anti-trans playbook,” George said. One major finding concerned voter opinion in battleground states: “Voters of all demographics tended to support Republican positions on transgender issues … that indicated that trans rights could be a really successful political issue,” she said.
In George’s account, those political messages, along with an influx of funding and organization from groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, led to a rash of state laws restricting transgender civil rights in sports, medical care, identity cards and public bathrooms. The Alliance Defending Freedom is a conservative Christian legal advocacy group that helped overturn Roe v Wade and is classified as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
George said conviction and calculation both played roles. “I don’t want to discount the fact that some of the conservative leaders are evangelicals who firmly believe that there are two sexes and that it is immutable, but I think there is also a strong political element,” she said. “Some of it may be backlash to liberalism, particularly the Democratic party under Biden, and some of it is political opportunism because once you see that it works in one state, that makes it easier to adopt in another.”
By the 2024 presidential election, transgender-related issues had become a major focus of national campaigning. Trump dedicated much of his campaign time to promises about transgender-related issues, from sports to healthcare, and “Kamala is for They/Them. Trump is for You.” was one of the most aired political ads in the final days of the campaign. George said the laws already on the books, together with Trump’s political success campaigning on the issue in battleground states, set up a much different second Trump term than the first. “The groundwork was there,” she said. “What is different is the speed at which the Trump administration has seized upon them. But I think that is part and parcel of a different strategy on the part of his administration coming in the second time … where if you do all of these things at once, it’s harder for the other side to respond.” A photograph shows Donald Trump signing the freedom of speech executive order inside Capital One Arena on 20 January 2025 in Washington DC (Carlos Barría/Reuters).
The shift has registered culturally as well. Approximately 1% to 3% of Americans are transgender. The Guardian reported that former college swimmer Riley Gaines had built a career speaking against transgender women’s participation in sports. Fox News spent three weeks of the summer airing at least 130 segments raising concern about the possibility of transgender athletes playing in the WNBA — a league in which no transgender women have ever played. The Guardian also reported that books mentioning transgender characters were routinely banned from schools and libraries and that Disney erased a transgender character’s storyline from an animated Pixar series in 2024 before the show could be released. “It’s been a long, long 10 years, to say the least,” Chestnut said.
The direction of state policy is not uniform, George cautioned: “It’s important to keep in mind that the states are a patchwork, and that there are lots of states moving against trans rights, and counter-moves with states protecting trans rights, and those states are disproportionately populated. So it’s inaccurate to say that everyone is moving in lockstep against trans rights.” Some big Democratic midterm winners in battleground states maintained support for transgender rights, including Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Senator-elect Troy Jackson in Maine.
The Guardian’s analysis linked headlines over the past 10 years about laws targeting transgender people and political rhetoric that stoked fear about them to a change in public opinion. Between 2022 and 2025, American sentiment for laws or policies protecting transgender people from discrimination went down eight points overall, according to Pew Research. The differences between Republican- and Democrat-identified voters remained stark — just 5% of Republicans favor requiring health insurance companies to cover gender-affirming care, compared with 40% of Democrats — and the loss of support was seen across the political spectrum. “You see a tremendous opportunity for inclusive policy with this blue wave, but there is a sobering reminder from the passage of all these ballot initiatives that the discourse in the country has really negatively affected the lives of trans people and will continue to for some time,” Redfield said of the midterm results.
Those studying this political process closely hope voters and politicians alike will see that the federal government has proven that any group could be targeted using the same approach. Chestnut believes that the more people understand the connection between attacks on the transgender community and other groups having rights taken away, the more effective political organizing could be. “I think trans people might be the testing case for a broader attack,” he said. “What we’re looking at is a complete restriction of bodily autonomy of all people that are not cis, white, Christian and conservative. Whether that’s immigration, trans people or people seeking abortions, or voters’ rights.” According to the Guardian’s analysis, the laws and political rhetoric together could open the door to “much bigger discrimination.”
Chestnut thinks the movement’s future lies in building coalitions to protect all targeted groups. “We learned that if you want to come for immigrant communities and take them away from their homes and families, then you will lose elections. The way that America has finally started to unite on the tragedy that is immigration enforcement in this country is remarkable. We can do that for the trans community, too.”