The Supreme Court is poised to add more cases related to LGBT policies in the coming months, after it handed down another major ruling regarding transgender issues when it upheld a pair of state laws banning biological men from women’s sports last week.
The high court ruled 6-3 on Tuesday in the consolidated cases of Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., upholding laws in Idaho and West Virginia, respectively, that ban biological men from women’s sports as lawful under Title IX and the equal protection clause. The ruling came nearly a year after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Skrmetti to uphold state laws banning transgender surgeries and drugs for minors. As the Supreme Court continues to wade into transgender legal issues, there are several cases that appear likely to end up before the justices.
Washington’s runaway transgender minors law
The Supreme Court announced last week the next case it will hear for arguments involving transgender matters. The high court said Monday it will hear International Partners for Ethical Care, Inc. v. Ferguson in its upcoming term, weighing whether parents may sue over Washington state’s law that “deliberately displaces their decisionmaking role as to ‘gender transitions’ of their children, and in so doing creates present and likely future impediments to their ability to parent their children as they deem best for them.”
The case centers on a law in Washington that allows runaway minors to get transgender surgeries without parental permission, in addition to not requiring the state to inform the parents of their child’s location and condition, by making it a “protected heal care service.” The petition filed by a parental rights group and a coalition of parents urged the high court to reverse lower court rulings, which had tossed out the lawsuit for lacking standing.
“The Ninth Circuit determined that the very objects or targets of the relevant statutes — parents who do not wish to affirm their children’s gender confusion — lack standing to challenge those statutes. And it did so despite Petitioners’ alleging current injuries to their ability to parent and the risk of catastrophic future injuries to that ability, and despite the requirement that these allegations must be taken as true at the pleading stage,” the petition to the Supreme Court said.
“To paraphrase Hamlet, ‘something is rotten’ in standing doctrine when parents who are the object of a ‘gender-transition’ law have to wait for the (likely) irreparable injury of their child’s actual transition before they can sue. Only this Court can excise the rot,” the petition continued.
America First Legal, one of the groups supporting the parents in their legal fight against the state, said they are looking forward to the high court hearing the case and are confident the Supreme Court will side with the coalition.
“Washington State built a legal regime that targets fit parents, encourages their children to run away, and then keeps mom and dad in the dark while the state takes over,” AFL senior counsel Nick Barry said in a statement. “Parents should not have to wait until the irreversible damage is done before they are allowed to walk through the courthouse doors. We are grateful the Supreme Court has agreed to hear this case, and we are confident the Court will agree that parents are injured when the government targets their children like this.”
Challenges to state laws allowing biological men in women’s sports
The Supreme Court’s ruling in B.P.J. left several questions unanswered about transgender policies, including on sports policies, as Jonathan Adler, a professor at William & Mary Law School, noted at a Federalist Society panel following the ruling.
“It was not deciding the question of whether — which is pending in some lower courts — or not there could be a Title IX violation if a state or school fails to exclude biological males from female sports in certain circumstances,” Adler said. “So there are these cases where claims about how things like locker rooms and stuff are handled, whether that could create a hostile educational environment. The court says it wasn’t deciding that.”
The ruling this week affects the 27 states where laws barring biological men from women’s sports were upheld, but for the other states, where biological males are allowed to compete against biological women in women’s sports, another case would need to be taken up by the Supreme Court to determine whether those other states are breaking the law. Several such cases are working their way up through the judiciary.
Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative law firm that helped bring the pair of cases on women’s sports decided by the high court on Tuesday, has multiple cases challenging state policies allowing biological men in women’s sports moving through lower courts. Last month, the group filed its latest lawsuit, challenging Washington’s policy after a female participating in a high school girls’ wrestling tournament claimed she was sexually assaulted by a biological male fighter she competed against. She said officials did not inform her that her opponent was a biological male who identified as a woman, and she sued by claiming the policy is a Title IX violation.
“A 15-year-old girl was sexually assaulted because of political cowardice. Washington state officials insist on pushing gender ideology at all costs — even at the expense of girls’ safety and privacy,” ADF senior counsel Kate Anderson said in a statement. “Our client’s story is proof of the grave harms caused by lying about biology. This must end — otherwise, girls will continue getting hurt and violated.
“We are urging the court to require state officials to change their policy to ensure that girls’ privacy and safety are protected when they compete in the sports they love. No girl should have to unknowingly wrestle a boy. And at a minimum, parents must be notified before their daughters are matched against male opponents,” Anderson added.
School secret gender transition policies
One of the major disputes in the realm of transgender legal battles that appears poised to reach the Supreme Court is school policies that hide student gender transitions from their parents. The policies involve school officials actively hiding a student’s use of a different name, pronouns, and bathroom facilities from his or her parents.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 emergency docket ruling that temporarily halted enforcement of California’s secret student gender transition policy, giving a preview of how the high court initially feels on the matter should it make its way to the Supreme Court’s merits docket.
The ruling in Mirabelli v. Bonta pointed to the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which upheld parents’ rights to opt their children out of LGBT materials at school and found that not permitting such an option violated the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
“Under long-established precedent, parents — not the State — have primary authority with respect to ‘the upbringing and education of children,’” the order in Mirabelli said. “The right protected by these precedents includes the right not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.”
John Bursch, senior counsel at ADF, told the Washington Examiner earlier this year that the policies allowing for “secret social transitions at public schools” are the “most critical issue” he hopes the Supreme Court addresses regarding transgender policies across the country.
“That can cause incredible harm to those young people, and parents have a right to know when that’s happening and to not have the schools interfere in the mental health treatment that they’re giving their children,” Bursch said.
Despite issuing the emergency docket ruling in Mirabelli, the high court declined two opportunities to take up a case involving the issue on its merits docket in April. The issue could still be brought up by the justices to their merits docket as soon as this term, as cases challenging these policies continue to make their way through federal courts.
SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS BANS ON BIOLOGICAL MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS
The Supreme Court ended its term on Tuesday after issuing the final opinions from the 58 cases it heard from October 2025 through the end of April, with major issues such as birthright citizenship and laws banning biological men from women’s sports closing out the term.
The high court’s next term starts on Oct. 5, when oral arguments begin for the dozens of cases the justices will hear through the end of April 2027. The next Supreme Court term is expected to conclude at the end of June 2027, when the final opinions of the term will be released.